Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As is well known, the return of the beloved

does not correct

the loss of the beloved

- Persephone the Wanderer, Louise Glück

The rumble of hog motorcycles speeding (please, somebody) away, the crackle of distant flames, and the far-off, belated sound of sirens assaults Spike’s ears.  The oily scent of burning petrol overlays all the usual Sunnydale smells, and Dawn is missing.

He rushes down Revello Drive, aware the sounds are growing yet more distant, knowing that is a good sign.  By the time he’s reached the path up to the Summers house he can recognize none of the Scoobies have been around in hours and hours, and Dawn is missing.

The door is cracked just a hair open and Spike rushes through it, heart in his throat, and Dawn is—

Dawn is here.  He can smell her, a fresh scent overlaid with adrenaline-sweat, he can hear the sound of her step, distinct as robinsong to the ear.

For just a second, it all flashes through his mind’s eye, anyway: Dawn’s body splayed out after some hell-creature made sport of her.  Blood all around her still-little body.  Big blue eyes open forever.  The image rushes through him like a seizure.  Something in him creaks a little, like a rotten floorboard getting ready to give way under a careless step, and it sparks a kind of desperate rage inside of him.  An inferno.

“Dawn!” he shouts.

“I, I’m here!”

Her voice sounds a little strange: thready.  Off.

It only makes the flames lick higher.

“Thank god!” he shouts as he sees her at the top of the stair.  “Scared me half to death,” he says, and hears himself.  Hears two things: that the metaphor doesn’t make sense and that it easily trips off his tongue.  He’s Dawn’s big brother now, only family she has, but it strikes him now how easy it is to play the part, like all this time he’s just been waiting for permission to look after a Key in the shape of a girl.  “Well, more to death,” he allows, before the rage flickers back to life.  “You!  I could kill you,” he tells her.

She’s still walking down the stairs.  Her gait is strange.  He wouldn’t recognize it if he heard it far-off.  It’s like she’s afraid each step might give way if she doesn’t hit it with her toe just right.  More rotten floorboards, everything coming apart.  “Spike,” she says, but he isn’t in any mood for her excuses.  She isn’t taking him seriously.  She needs to take this seriously; he can’t lose her, too.

“I mean it!” he assures her.  “I could rip your head off one-handed,” he says, demonstrating how he would grip her by the throat in some other, more brutal life, “and drink from your brainstem.”

“Look,” Dawn says.

Buffy—it is Buffy—that’s her name—stands at the top of the stair.  She’s ashamed of how long it took her to recognize Spike’s voice.

Well.  Not recognize, exactly.

It took that long to put Spike’s voice into context.

When she heard him shouting, threatening, it was like the sound flipped through a Rolodex of memories.  That voice meant danger!—no, wait, she should mostly be annoyed, tinged with reluctant amusement.  No, that wasn’t right anymore, either.

Oh! Buffy thought, as a wave of trust and awe seemed to wash through her, still with an aftertaste of that irritated humor.  Spike’s voice nearby meant Dawn was safe.  That was a good feeling.

Til the end of the world!  He must have meant it.

It had looked very apocalypsy outside.

“Look,” Dawnie’s saying, and it takes Buffy a moment to realize Dawn means at her.

“Yeah, I’ve seen the bloody bot before,” Spike is saying dismissively, “I didn’t think she’d patch up so—”  And then his gaze snags on her.

Oh.  Buffy is putting it together, now.  The bot.  That was what she’d seen torn to pieces, outside.

Poor thing.

That’s the last thought Buffy has for awhile that isn’t about Spike.

His eyes have gone—startled.  Startled is a good word.  It describes the shape of his face.  But there’s more.  Buffy doesn’t think it’s just because she was—elsewhere—that she can’t read the whole story written there.

She’s sure, dead or living, no one has ever looked at her like Spike is looking at her, now.

“She’s kind of, um,” says Dawn.  “She’s been through a lot.”

Spike still seems to be realizing, in bits and pieces, that she’s really standing here.  Or maybe he’s realizing over and over and over again.

“There’s,” says Dawn.  “There are some things…”

Is it possible Spike’s staring because her buttons aren’t done up properly?  Buffy seems to remember that people associate nakedness with sex, here.  She doesn’t want to appear to be taunting Spike with sex by being only half-dressed.  She frowns down at the buttons on the loose top Dawn found her.  She reties the halter behind her neck so it lies properly and buttons the last of the stays at the front.  The absence at her back twinges strangely. 

She flexes her shoulders as she works, examining that final set of feelings in the Spike-Rolodex.  Trust— and awe that she could—and a kind of now-I-can-rest relief because of his strength and devotion.  Had before-Heaven Buffy been in love with Spike?  She feels that isn’t quite right, but it’s close.  The awe part especially, even recalled through the muffling gauze of time and death, bears a certain resemblance.

“Spike,” Dawn says, “are you okay?”

Buffy jerks her head away from her busy fingers to see that Spike’s face has gone through another transformation.  She can read something like disbelief—fear?—in his open-book features.

“I,” he says, and stops.

Buffy waits.  A twinge, this time not at her shoulders.

Deeper.

She realizes she is worried about Spike.

Like Dawn is.

“What did you do?” he whispers, and Buffy realizes another thing.

Spike’s gaze has been searching. 

He is trying to figure out if it’s really Buffy—or if it’s something else. 

Buffy isn’t sure how to fix it.

“Me?” Dawn squeaks, in a way that ought to be totally normal, but instead physically hurts Buffy’s literal brain.

She winces.

“…Nothing!” says Dawn.

Buffy believes her.

“Her hands.”

“Right here,” Buffy says softly.

Spike’s gaze flickers up to her face.  “Your hands,” he corrects, knowing what she wants right away: for them to acknowledge she’s here, she’s really here.  Everything feels unreal enough without her sister and her—without her allies talking over her head.

“I was gonna fix ‘em,” Dawn says, apologetically.  “I don’t know how they got like that.”

“I do,” Spike says, and she watches him flicker away a moment, to a long-ago time.  “Clawed her way out of her coffin, that’s how.”  Then, he seems to remember her adjuration to include her.  “Isn’t that right?” he says.  Voice still low.  Even.  He hears how she’s speaking.  He probably saw her wince.  He’s already making way for her.

It’s so kind.

She wonders if that’s about to change.

“It’s,” Buffy says, glancing up at him.  A glancing glance seems to be all she can manage, with him staring at her like that.  “It’s what I had to do.”

“I’ve done it myself,” he says.

Well.

Of course he has.

Buffy hurts a lot, everywhere.  The absence-weight at her back aches.  The lights are so bright, and everything is so loud.  Even the halter top feels weird at the back of her neck, a pressure that’s bothersome and strange.  She would really prefer to be naked, she realizes all over again, but once again her higher sensibilities inform her that’s unacceptable here, and that Spike—

She shakes her head.

Spike wouldn’t get turned on, she realizes.  He’d whip his coat off and cover her with it, like a knight in a painting.  It would make him and Dawn worry.

Buffy recognizes the workings of her brain are strange, now.  Different from how they used to be: both more analytical and through an outsider’s lens.

More analytical because an outsider’s lens?  Nothing quite makes sense anymore, nothing aligns, so she has to puzzle it all out.

Buffy comes back to herself realizing that they’ve all been lost in thought: her, Dawn, and Spike.  Spike seems to come to life just as she does, reaching out one arm.  “Come,” he says.  “We’ll take care of you.”

Spike herds her towards the living room; she sees him reach for her shoulder, then twitch back, like he isn’t allowed to touch.

Buffy looks up at him.  He’s still behind her.  He’s still herding her forward, so she moves, but she wonders why he thought he couldn’t even press a hand to her shoulder.  It’s possible he thought she would shout, or flinch, but she thinks her first impression was right: he’s afraid of taking liberties.

He’s afraid she’s so damaged that she might not protest even though she’d want to, were she in her right mind.

Ought she?  Protest?

She isn’t sure.

The ways of people are strange.

The ways of vampires interacting with people are possibly stranger.

He’s asking Dawn to get some things to fix up her hands, and then she’s settling down onto the couch, and he’s perched on the coffeetable across from her.  He finds his courage, or else he can’t navigate around the shoals of necessity, because he’s suddenly clasping her hands.

Oh, she thinks, looking down.  Spike’s hands are cold, but his grip is firm.  The pressure feels foreign, but also nice: grounding. 

She thinks she remembers this.

Touch: good for humans.  Settling. 

Kind.

Spike is being kind.

She looks up to find that his gaze is rising simultaneously.

Spike is staring at her again in that way that no one else ever has.  She feels that twinge again, the deep-down one.

“How long was I gone?” she says.  She can hear emotion in her voice for the second time.  The first: irritation at being left out.  The second: a little empathy.  It must have been a long time.  Spike is looking at her like the very sight of her is reconstructing his whole world, brick by brick.

“…A hundred and forty-seven days, yesterday.  A hundred and forty-eight today.”  He gives her the bare curve of a smile.  “Except today doesn’t count, does it?”  He looks down at their clasped hands again, and Buffy gets the distinct impression he feels he’s getting away with something.  “How long was it for you?”

She shakes her head.  It’s too hard to explain.  And then—he’s holding her so lightly, but his thumb brushes up against one of the worse scrapes, and—

When she opens her eyes, Spike has drawn back, and his eyes are wide, staring just behind her.  That’s the first thing she notices. 

The second is that his stance is defensive, like he’s getting ready to protect her from the appendages that have burst from between her shoulderblades.

That’s when Dawn walks back in with their well-stocked home medical kit.

“Well.  Now you’ve seen them,” Dawnie says to Spike.

Spike gawps.

He can’t help it.

They’re enormous.  They’re wings.

They’re Buffy’s.

Somehow, he still has hold of her hands.

“You startled me,” Buffy explains.  Quiet, still. 

The wings shake out a bit.  Settle.

Spike finds his gaze darting back up to her face.

It’s still the same.

Buffy’s face.

Buffy’s large, dark eyes.  Green and gray and even-keeled.  Patient.

Her little nose.  Snubbed, just a bit, at the tip.

Sweep of sweet gold hair.  Darker lashes that hint at its true color.

She’s waiting for him to say something, he thinks.

“Er,” he says.

Try harder!

“Does it hurt?” he tries.

She shakes her head.  “Aches.  A little,” she says, shifting her shoulders as if her muscles are a bit knotted instead of—Jesus Christ.  “I.  Came back like this.”

They’re lovely, is the thing.

Like everything else about her.

They’re not pure white.

They’re this kind of mottled cream-and-white-and-dark-gold, and there’s a bit of iridescence in some of them so that certain parts look a little bluish.  He isn’t sure if the plumage is a real blue in places or if that bit’s a trick of the light.

“They’re pretty messed up too,” Dawn says, coming the rest of the way forward and setting the med kit down, like this is an unfortunate but entirely normal thing to happen, and Spike realizes they have not raised her right— or maybe they’ve raised her exactly right, for Hellmouth values of ‘right’.  “All ruffled and turned around, huh, Buffy?”

Buffy blinks and then suddenly, one of the huge wings is moving forward, curling around so she can inspect it, but Dawn and Spike are in the way, so it’s more like she’s suddenly mantling them than just getting a closer look.

I’m dreaming, he thinks, not for the first time.

Then, they do look a right mess.  Her wings are laced through with gravedirt, feathers turned all the wrong way, some of the primaries snapped.  He amends the terrible picture of Buffy awakening in her grave and beating her way out to awakening in her grave with wings flailing against the wood and it’s somehow worse.

“Well, we can fix that, too,” he hears himself say, and it makes no sense how matter-of-fact he sounds.  But for now he’s—not Spike.  He thinks he’s William.  The William who rubbed his mother’s back until she’d finished coughing up blood and responded with, there you are!  All clear, Mother.  Now, which novel shall we read in the garden to-day?

It slips on easy, that worn and weathered role.

And then there’s a clatter and Scoobies are spilling through the door, all a-chatter, Buffy’s wing snapping back behind her to keep her view of the door clear.  Spike makes out, “Buffy!  Are you here?” and “you’re—” until they catch sight of Buffy and, one at a time, fall silent.

“Oh my god,” is the first coherent thing that emerges from the Scooby pile.  It’s Tara.

Spike moves to stand, escape—it sounds like they knew about this, and of course they did, of course it was Willow, who else would—?!

But Buffy’s damaged hands tighten around his, wordlessly.

She isn’t even looking at him, she’s looking at them, but it doesn’t matter.  She could crook her finger and he’d follow her into hell.

So he settles back into his seat as Dawn rounds on the newcomers.

“…Buffy?” Xander breathes.

“Well!” says Anya.  “She’s not a zombie!  I say we celebrate.”

“You knew she was back?” Dawn demands.  “How did you know?”

Spike frees one hand with a bit of difficulty.  He shoots Buffy a look that he hopes conveys—god, whatever alchemical reaction is going on inside of him—and jostles the med kit a little, demonstratively, in his free hand.

He sees her breathe out.  The ghost of a smile.

He could die all over again.

“H-how?” Willow manages.  “W-what?  H-how?”

“I t-thought you s-said she was in a hell dimension,” Tara moans.

“I, I thought she was!” Willow exclaims.  “She, she fell through a portal to hell!”

“Hey,” says Dawn, dangerously.

Spike looks up to find she’s planted herself in front of the two of them and folded her arms.

“Back off,” she says.

And…

The babbling cuts off.

Buffy gives him another one of those tiny smiles.  So tiny as to be microscopic, being honest.  But the edge of her lip curls the barest amount and she gets this crinkle at the corner of one eye.

He loves her so much it could possibly explode out of him, just guts spilling everywhere.

He begins dabbing at the cuts with a little disinfectant. 

Buffy winces.  The wings shudder.

“Sorry, love.  Sorry,” he whispers over her hands.

“You did this.  What did you do?” Dawn demands, gesturing towards the otherworldliness that is Buffy, and it’s every bit as accusatory as it ought to be.

“A spell,” Willow says.  “We, we did a spell.”

“W-we didn’t think it worked—”

“Well, it worked!” Dawn shoots back, and Spike realizes, slowly, that he is proud of her.  He moves on to Buffy’s other hand, dabbing at the wounds, there.  “You brought her back but you left her in her coffin!”

“Ohgod,” says Willow, clapping a hand to her mouth.

“She had to claw her way out and, and, I can’t believe you were so careless!”

“Dawnie,” Buffy says.  Her eyes have squinched closed.  Spike thought it was the pain in her hands, but apparently it’s also the noise.

Dawn breathes out, one long, low whoosh of air.  She plops next to Buffy, who immediately mantles her wing around Dawn on that side.

Willow’s cheeks are streaked with tears.  “Buffy,” she whispers.  For the first time, she seems aware of Buffy as a person again, and not a project.  Her voice is the right volume, and guilt drips off her.  “I, I didn’t know, I really thought—are you all right?  Are you… can I do anything to help?”

Buffy looks at her a long moment, then at the rest of the Scoobies: Tara, Xander, Anya.  “You couldn’t have known,” she says, eventually.  She pauses again.  Frowns, as if something has just occurred to her.  “I wish you wouldn’t have left me there.”  Her frown deepens.  “It was hard to get out.  And.  Confusing.”

Spike looks up from where he’s retrieving gauze to see the kids all looking green.  Harris speaks first.

“Oh, god, Buffy.  The bikers—there were demons.  They chased us away from you.  We had no idea you were… awake in there.”

Buffy blinks at him.

“Was there a ‘sorry’ in there at all?” Spike snaps, then winces a split second after Buffy.  “Sorry,” he murmurs, tucking the end of the gauze in place on Buffy’s right hand, then turning to face the Scoobies.  “You lot took our girl out of heaven and left her in her actual grave, and I’ve yet to hear an honest apology from any of you.”

“Like you’re sorry any part of Buffy is back,” Xander hisses.  His gaze flickers down to where Spike is mummifying Buffy’s left hook.  “…And letting you touch her,” he adds.

“Xander,” Buffy says, and her voice is quiet, but there’s warning in it.  “Spike is helping.”

“Yeah, it’s why Spike is helping that’s—”

“Xander,” Buffy says again, in the same tone.  Her eyes are still very large and very dark. 

Her second calm admonition seems to do the trick.  Xander shuffles in place as if to physically change course.  “Are you okay, Buff?” he says, and Spike despises the shot of fellow-feeling that shakes through him.

Harris is so worried.

Buffy is calm and remote, but she’s letting Spike look after her and it is—yes, it is—very much out of character.  Is she all right?

“I’m okay,” Buffy says, swiftly.  She settles the wings.  “Everyone else can… see these, right?”

Xander issues a half-hysterical giggle.

Anya leans forward a little.  “They’re very attractive,” she says in her straightforward way, “if you like that sort of thing.”

Buffy ducks her head.  “Thank you, Anya,” she murmurs.

“Do they confer special powers?” Anya queries.

Buffy looks up, gazes around the room.  “I don’t… know,” she says.

“Oh!” Willow says, excited.  “That could be a thing, you know, there are all kinds of possible—”

“Back off, okay?” Dawn snaps from beside Buffy.  “Geez, you guys need to learn to take a hint.  Spike and I were doing fine helping Buffy.  The cavalcade is a little much.  Can you guys go away, now?”

Spike bites his lip.

Buffy settles back into the couch, feathers quite literally ruffling with upset.

They make it very hard to pretend she’s as calm as her face looks.

Spike realizes there’s only so long he can fiddle with the bandage around Buffy’s left hand and finally tucks the end of the gauze into place and lets go.

“Thank you, Spike,” Buffy says clearly.  She curls her wing around Dawn.  “Thanks, Dawnie,” she says, and Spike doesn’t think he’s imagining that warmth in her voice, like the first rays of winter sunlight cresting the horizon line, and Buffy looks at her friends, puzzled.  “Thank-you, everyone.  For.  Bringing me back.”  She frowns.  “I think.”

Chapter Text

This finally gets rid of them.

Buffy breathes a sigh of relief once Xander and Anya depart.  Xander keeps staring at Spike with this unfriendly look in his eye and Spike keeps pretending he doesn’t notice.  She wonders if Xander knows Spike is doing him a kindness by ignoring it, or if Xander thinks Spike’s afraid.

She can still hear Willow and Tara upstairs: Slayer hearing times ten, with an acuity so needle-sharp it hurts.  But at least they’re both gone, now: they’re not looking at her.

“They were gone, before,” Dawn tells Spike, apropos of nothing, and it takes Buffy a few moments of processing to realize she’s talking about the wings.  “I saw Buffy with them, and then once she calmed down, they just kinda… disappeared.”  She turns to Buffy.  “Buffy, can you put ‘em away, for now?”

Buffy twitches her shoulders, just to see if she can, but nothing happens.  “Ow,” she says.

“That hurt, luv?” Spike murmurs, then checks himself.  “I mean.”

He’s being kind again.  Luv is something British people say.  It doesn’t mean I love you.

Or it doesn’t when most people say it.

“It’s pulling.  My shoulders,” Buffy murmurs, shifting first one shoulder and then the other.  Before, there was phantom weight, like a phantom limb with phantom pain, a sort of distant stretch and burn.  It’s getting to feel bad, now, the pain sharper, more present.

Spike takes her hands again and Buffy likes it.  She wishes he’d squeeze to remind her she has a physical form, but he probably doesn’t remember exactly where every injury is on her hands.  He seems startled again, maybe at the fact that she’s here, maybe at his own audacity.

“Watch,” he murmurs, and his face transforms.  She pays attention as his gaze bleeds from blue to golden, traces the ridges on his face with her gaze, pays particular attention to his eyeteeth.  She’s never gotten to study the transformation moving across a vampire’s features; she thinks a shift this slow must take lots of control.  And then it’s gone, and his human features are there again.  Buffy traces her gaze over him contemplatively.  His eyes are an interesting shade of blue.

“…How?” says Buffy.

“For me, it’s like it’s inside, always, just beneath the skin.  So I pull it forward, or I push it back.”

“Pull it forward.  Push it back.”

Spike nods, looking sheepish.  “Dunno it’ll help you, pet, but—”

A whoosh.

“It worked!” Dawn exclaims. 

“Push it back,” Buffy whispers to herself.  “Pull it forward.”

The wings settle, heavy, at her back; she can’t hold back a moan at the stab of pain that darts through the muscles of her back, like an electric shock.  “Push it back,” she whispers, closing her eyes, and the terrible weight disappears.

“You got it!” Dawnie says encouragingly.  “Look at you, you’re amazing!”

Buffy looks at her little sister, the mystical Key turned teenager, who’s been kind and gentle and supportive as Spike, who’s had a hundred more years to get good at looking after somebody.  “You’re amazing,” she repeats, but Dawn gets it right away and flushes with surprised pleasure.

“Spike’s been looking after me all summer,” she blurts, but her voice stays quiet.  “Just like he promised.”

Buffy looks at them both.  Spike’s all bashful and Dawnie’s chin is hitched, like she’s determined Spike get his due, and suddenly she feels the Spike-Rolodex flip to a new card.  It’s love for sure, though she’s not sure what kind, yet.  “You took care of each other,” she says, trying to press all her feelings into those few words.  “I’m so glad.”

Spike shakes his head. 

Not disagreeing, she doesn’t think.  His mercurial features flash through awe, joy, disbelief, and some kind of stabbing sorrow: remembering losing her, maybe.  His hands twitch around hers, like isn’t sure if he should let go. 

Buffy looks at them both.  This isn’t heaven.  But it’s wonderful to be around people she cares about and feel like she’s doing a good job at loving them. 

It feels like the world is a little nicer than she remembers.

“I really,” Buffy says.  A wave of exhaustion suddenly laps over her whole body.  She is being dragged by an undertow.  “I really need to go to bed, now.”

Spike’s alarmed.  He finally releases her hands.  “Yeah.  ‘Course you do!  Shoulda realized.”  His hand goes up to the side of his head.  “You must be…”  He grins at her.  He can’t seem to help it.  “So tired.”

She feels her face do something in response.  It’s not quite a smile, she doesn’t think, but she feels like she comes over a little warmer.  She turns to Dawn.  “Is my room…?”

“Still your room,” Dawn says, quickly.  “God,” she blurts.  “You’re here.  You’re really, really here.  I’m being careful but I would very much like to hug you right now.”

Buffy tilts her head to one side, pondering.  “Okay,” she says.

Her hunch is right.  Touch is good, she remembers this all over again.  Dawn’s arms feel nice and Dawn smells good, like home.  When Dawn pulls away, her eyes are wet.  Buffy reaches out to brush her fingers against her sister’s lashes and withdraws a drop before remembering oh yeah, tears, and wondering if that was too weird.

Dawn looks like she’d forgive Buffy any weirdness, any weirdness at all, just now.  She’s smiling this wobbly smile at Buffy.  “Spike?” she says.

Oh.  Spike’s still here.

Buffy wonders if he’s waiting for a hug, too.

She’d like to hug him, but she won’t.  People would think that was very weird.

Pleased with her reasoning, Buffy nods to herself. 

But it still doesn’t explain what Spike is still doing here.

Maybe she can find a way to ask that isn’t cruel.  She turns to Spike.

He’s looking at her with this kind of bare desperation, and his eyes are swimming, too.  “What if this has all been a wonderful dream?” he says.  “What if I take my eyes off you and you’re gone again?”

“Oh, I’m gonna sleep in her bed,” Dawn announces.  “One arm draped over.  It’s the only way I’ll know she can’t poof! disappear in the night.”

Weirdly, Spike seems satisfied by this.  He sighs, and his shoulders slump.  He nods, dragging a hand down his face.

These freaks, Buffy thinks fondly.  She reaches out and catches a tear from Spike’s lashes, too.

Spike’s gaze goes wide and wild, and his lips are parted when she moves her hand out of her field of vision.

“Oh,” Buffy says.  “Should I not have—?”

Spike takes in a shuddering, sharp breath.

“You don’t touch Spike a lot,” Dawn explains.

Buffy somehow loves her a little more for this display of patience with her newest oddity.  “No, I know that,” she says.  It’s important they register that she understands and remembers important things.  “But.  He was crying.”

Spike smiles at her like she hung the moon.  “Only ‘cause I’m so happy to see you.  It can’t help but spill out a little.”  He gives her one more, searching look, still smiling.  “G’night, Buffy.”

“Goodnight, Spike.”

Spike turns and strides determinedly for the door.  He doesn’t let himself look back.

Buffy turns to Dawn.  “Were you serious, about—”

“You bet your britches, sister,” Dawn says like an old grandma and Buffy can’t help but smile for real.  It’s the first real smile since she’s gotten back.

It sits strange on her face.

Buffy wakes up in her childhood bedroom and has a split-second’s panic; but Dawn is curled into her and one arm is thrown over her waist, surprisingly weighted and iron-strong.  When Buffy shifts, she realizes she is in a kind of pliable human cage: Dawn will let her wriggle around but not escape.  It is a surprisingly pleasing way to wake up to your first day on earth.

Dawn doesn’t look much older, so she guesses it can’t have been that long.

She hears Spike’s voice in her head: a hundred and forty-seven.  That’s… five months?  Oh, wow.

Buffy absently runs a free hand over Dawn’s arm.

Dawnie was all alone nearly half a year.

Except, Spike had her.

Buffy’s whole body relaxes. 

That’s right.  She trusted Spike to take care of Dawn.  And here she is!  Til the end of the world.  He must’ve meant it.

Buffy frowns.  The thought feels familiar.  Her head may be running laps around the more important ideas.

Anyway: Dawn looks good.  Her hair hasn’t been cut in a long while but someone’s been making sure she washes and conditions it.  She’s always been skinny but hasn’t lost weight or if she did, she’s since gained it back.  She looks neat and clean.  She’s okay.

Not to mention that Dawn dealt with Buffy’s return with what can only be called aplomb.  She took Buffy home, and found a top for her that could accommodate the sudden appearance of wings—Buffy had removed the halter last night and found that it was barely even stretched out weird—and she cleaned Buffy up, and she’d asked Spike if he was okay and stood up for her with the Scoobies.  Dawn isn’t just neat and clean, she is well-adjusted.  That’s something like a Sunnydale miracle.

Maybe it’s early, yet.  Maybe Dawn is about to go on a crime spree, or sleep with half the town’s populace, or explode.  But right now, she looks happy and healthy and normal-for-Sunnydale, and Buffy, stroking a careful hand through Dawn’s long fall of brown hair, finds herself very grateful.

Everything in the house still feels a little unfamiliar, though, so Buffy lets Dawn make her breakfast.  “I swear, I know how to cook, now,” she explains.

It takes Buffy a moment to remember Dawn as a disaster in the kitchen.

“Tara taught me to cook!  And Spike,” Dawn says, wrinkling her nose as she moves through the kitchen with confidence.  “He knows all these old-timey dishes, but he can read a recipe good as anyone.”

Dawn’s life post-Buffy is beginning to take shape in Buffy’s mind.

“Did you hang out with Tara and Spike a lot?” Buffy manages.

Dawn starts to nod, then pauses.  “Well, I hung out with Tara or Spike a lot,” she explains.  “You know Spike and the Scoobies are… unmixy things,” she says, borrowing one of Buffy’s old phrases.  “They kinda-sorta had to mix while you were gone, but I always got the feeling it was under duress.  Or they wanted to sort of let Spike know it was under duress,” Dawn explains, cracking three eggs in a pan.  “See?  Look at that!  No shells or anything!”

She presents the pan for inspection and Buffy dutifully nods.

“So if Tara had a night class, Spike’d be there.  And we’d watch old movies or he’d help me with my homework—”

Buffy feels her eyebrows jounce.

“—or we’d bake, or something.  But then once Willow and Tara got home, he’d make tracks.  You saw him last night.  He almost left automatically, just ‘cause they’d arrived, even though if you’d have asked him to stay, he would’ve slept at the foot of the bed.”  Dawn drew in a sharp little breath.  “Sorry.  I just mean.  He loves you so much.  He’s so happy you’re back.  We’re.  Happy you’re back.  Are you?  Happy?”

Buffy opens her mouth to lie.

Nothing comes out.

Huh.

She opens her mouth again.

Nothing comes out.

Dawn looks concerned.  And it isn’t the please-reassure-me concern, either.  “Hey,” she says in that new, gentle, Buffy’s-just-come-back voice.  “It’s totally okay if your feelings are… complicated… about it.  You don’t have to lie to me.”

Buffy’s head jerks up like a marionette’s.  “I don’t?”

Dawn’s features soften.  “Hey, Buffy!  No,” she says.

Buffy sighs out a long breath.  “I’m happy to see you,” she compromises.  “And the others.”

Dawn relaxes into a relieved smile.  “Good!  See, that’s good!  And honest!  Oh gosh, the eggs are gonna be desert-dry, hang on…”  And she turns back to the eggs and then plates them.  “See?  Really simple, but actually edible, I promise!  Let me get the salt and pepper.”

It’s just what Buffy didn’t know she needed: one food, plain, to get used to it rolling in her mouth, to the act of chewing and swallowing.  Dawn gives her a cup of water and she remembers how cups work and water tastes.  Despite the smell of cooking lingering in the air and the sun shining through the window and lighting up different objects different ways, and the rasp of the clothing tag on the back of her neck and the weird uncomfortableness of the kitchen island chairs, and the pain and phantom weight at her back, it’s all very manageable.

It’s then that she hears the others chatting outside.  They must’ve woken up before Buffy or Dawn and sat outside to avoid being overheard.  Not counting on Slayer hearing times ten.

“…consider if that’s really Buffy,” Anya is saying.

Buffy tilts her head to one side and sticks the fork in her mouth.  Chews.  Carefully.

“Of course she’s Buffy!” Willow protests.  “A little… different maybe, but she’s our Buffy!”

“M-maybe she’s just… t-traumatized,” Tara offers.

Buffy considers this.  Is she?  Traumatized?  Is that what this is?  This strangeness inside of her head, how the world seems so harsh and demanding?

“Xander, say something!” Willow orders.

“It’s Buffy,” says Xander, all definite, and something in Buffy uncurls.  “But whatever you wanna call it, she’s not thinking clearly.”

“She’s all messed up from being torn out of heaven and dropped back into her violent, iniquitous life as the Slayer,” Anya says, all matter-of-fact.  “She may choose to take revenge.”

“Ahn!”

“What?  I’m just saying what everyone is thinking…”

“You’re very not,” Willow says, darkly.  “But… maybe she shouldn’t be alone with Dawn,” she adds, reluctantly.

Buffy’s gaze darts to Dawn, who’s scrubbing the spatula at the sink.

“Sounds like Spike is back on call,” Tara murmurs, almost too quiet for Buffy to hear.

“Spike!” Xander exclaims.  “Yeah, right.  If Buffy said, it’s time to kill Dawnie so we can run away together, he’d pack his things!”

“I d-don’t t-think—” Tara hazards.

“Xander,” says Willow, chidingly.  “I think you know that’s not true.”

There is a moment or two of silence.  Buffy wonders what their faces are doing.

“Anyway,” says Willow, “I’ll drop by Spike’s crypt and let him know.  You won’t have to talk to him, Xander.”

“You don’t have to treat me like a child.”

“Clearly we do, sweetie,” Anya says, but gently.

Silence again.

“Buffy.”

Buffy looks up in surprise to find Dawnie, looking worried but tender.

“Your eggs’re cold.  You want me to microwave ‘em?”

Buffy looks at her plate.  Cold eggs are unappealing.  Slimy.  She looks up again.  “Yes, please.”

They didn’t once mention the wings, she realizes with a jolt.  That’s the strangest thing, because they’re the strangest thing.  Even Buffy, with her recent return to Planet Earth, knows that much.  She flexes her shoulders under their invisible weight and even remembers to blow on her reheated eggs before finishing them.

Spike tries to lie still, but scenes keep playing across all his senses, just these little flashes like he was taking photographs with his brain:

Buffy on the stair, eyes wide and gray-green.

The moment right after Buffy’s wings had erupted from her back; speckled down swinging back and forth through the air, little featherweight scythes.

Dawn’s balletic steps on the stair, features cautious, worried.

Buffy looking at his teardrop on the edge of a finger emerging from under white gauze, like she’d never seen anyone cry, before.

The sense-memory of the Scoobies spilling in the door, cacophonous, and Buffy’s fingers tightening around his.

Dawn’s sweet face, blown open with hope.  Her firm, back off!

Even Tara’s Oh, God! and Harris’s show of distrust win a spot in the carousel of memory that loops ‘round and ‘round ‘til Spike feels he may go mad.

He passes most of the day this way, trying and failing to sleep, until he’s interrupted by a visit from the Wicked Witch herself.

Willow wears a pale blue, diaphanous shirt that ties lightly at the throat, and Spike realizes that if he were chipless, he’d be desperately tempted to kill her, because he knows—he knows her, so he knows—she dressed in pale, White Hat colors and light makeup because she doesn’t want anyone to think of her in that slinky little number and dark lipstick she wore last night, raising the bloody dead.  She’s dressed up as Harmless, Little Willow, like a costume and a shield.

It makes him sick.

“Heyyy, Spike,” she says, and even the mannerisms and tone of voice are all slid back a few years.  It’s weird.  “How ya doin’?”

The urge to rend her to bits makes way for a sliver of curiosity.  This goes from deliberate obfuscation into something a little stranger and more intense.  He knows he can’t ask her if she’s all right, but he’s tempted to, nearly as tempted as he is to try and give her a fresh concussion.  “How do you think?” he queries.

She winces.  “I guess there are a lot of complicated feelings, huh?” she allows.  “How mad are you?”

Spike blinks.

“On a scale of one to a million.”

“Infinity,” he says.

“Fair,” she replies, and moves a little further into the crypt.  “Fair, that’s very fair and, and… we’re sorry.  For keeping you out of the loop.”

Spike twitches.  “I fought beside you all summer—”

“I know,” she says.  “Spike.  I know.”

“Then why?”

“Because,” she says.

“Because if she came back wrong, if any part of it was still Buffy, you knew—you knew I’d try to save her.  But you’d have to take care of it, wouldn’t you?”

Willow has gone so milk-pale her freckles look like constellations. 

And suddenly it’s not an abstraction anymore.  Willow would—Willow would have to—

He chokes.

“I’m sorry.  I’m sorry,” Willow says, and takes one, abortive step forward.  “I didn’t… worst-case scenario, I didn’t.  Want to burden you.”

Spike stares at her a moment.  She, at least, believes she’s telling the truth.  He realizes all over again she’s barely twenty.  It could be these past five months—past year—past few years?—have done something to him, because he is pretty certain he didn’t used to care about that kind of thing.

“And anyway, it, it wasn’t gonna happen,” she says firmly.  “It was only just in case.  And aren’t you happy?” she asks, desperately, like a child begging for approval; Spike’s stomach roils.  “Aren’t you happy she’s back, didn’t I—didn’t it go all right in the end?”

“It’s not the end, Willow,” Spike says evenly.  “Magic always has a price, and—”

“I paid it!” Willow says, urgently.  “I paid it, Spike.  I swear.  Nothing’s gonna come back on Buffy or, or Dawn.  I took care of things.”

She dressed up like her younger self because she feels small today, he suddenly realizes.  She thought she’d feel strong and powerful now, but she doesn’t.  “What do you need?” he says, dragging a hand down his face.

Willow looks caught out.  “Ah—huh?”

“You’re here.  You didn’t come to check up on me.  You need something.”

She winces.  “Yeah.  Uh.  Dawn.”

Spike is suddenly very awake.  “What about Dawn?  She all right?  Messed up over big sis?”

“Uh, no!” Willow says, bringing her hands forward.  “I mean, I guess.  It’s just—we need you to keep an eye on her.”

Well, this only gets more puzzling.  “Don’t I always?”

“Yeah,” Willow agrees, and her tight features soften a little.  “It’s just…”  She wraps her arms around her waist like she’s trying to hold her guts in.  She peers up at Spike from under her lashes.  “Buffy’s still a little… y’know.  Off.  We’re not worried she’d do anything bad on purpose!  More like she might leave the stove on and walk away, y’know?”

“You lot want me to babysit Buffy.”

Willow’s gaze flares, and Spike realizes that’s not what she meant at all.  But then something in her expression firms.  “Y’know what?  Yes.  I want you to keep an eye on Buffy.  And Dawn.”

It’s a split-second decision, and it’s the second incredible gift he’s received in twenty-four hours: permission to be exactly where he wants to be, from those most likely to deny him.  “Yes,” Spike breathes, “yes, of course I will.”

“Spike,” she says, like it’s the start of a much longer speech.

Spike takes one step closer to her in the dark.  They’re just a few feet away from each other, now.  They don’t look like strangers.

Her hands flutter.  For a moment, they rise to cover her face and he thinks she’ll cry; but then she drags them down and they flutter again.  Suddenly, he thinks he knows what’s expected.

“It’s all right, Red,” he says.  “She’ll be all right.”

“I know that,” Willow says, urgently.  “That’s not what—”  She looks around, as if she’s been dropped into Spike’s crypt at random and only just now realized where she is.  “You got furniture.”  She looks at him again, frowning.  Now he isn’t sure what she wants or expects at all.

“I’ll be there after dark.  You lot’ll have to keep an eye on her ‘til then.”

“Okay.”  And then Willow pauses and now he figures he’s gonna hear it, whatever she’s been holding back all this time, and apparently it’s, “thank you, Spike.  I’m glad you’re on our side.  I don’t know what we would’ve done without you, this summer.”

Spike jerks his head up.  “Died a few times yourselves, I expect.”

It’s the first time she’s thanked him.  That any of them have thanked him.  For anything.  Not that Spike’s been keeping track.

She waves and departs, introducing and cutting off a little sliver of sunshine as she goes.

He doesn’t try and sleep, after that.

He’s sure if he does, this will all have been a dream.

Chapter Text

Buffy manages to get through the day with Dawn’s help.  Dawn reminds her to eat—three times a day feels excessive, but her body is her body.  And Dawn only knows how to cook really simple things, but that’s good, because simple things seem to be what Buffy’s body can handle.

The wings don’t make a reappearance, but if they did, Buffy feels like she might be able to handle them, too.  Push out, pull in.  Easy.  Like pie.

Is pie easy?

“Did you make pie with Tara or Spike?” Buffy asks as they watch a detective film in black and white.  Dawn says it’s one of Spike’s favorites, The Thin Man.  She can’t really follow it, but she can tell it’s funny by the way Dawn laughs.

“No, why?”

“No reason.”  Buffy is curious about everything, but her attention seems to slide from one thing to the next unless someone is addressing her directly, and sometimes, even then.  But then the male half of the fast-talking couple on-screen says, How’d you like Grant’s tomb? and his wife replies, it’s lovely; I’m having a copy made for you, and Buffy laughs.

Dawn turns a look of such joy on her that Buffy resolves to do it again, and pays more attention.  She laughs four more times before the film is over.  The vibrations feel good in her chest.  She doesn’t remember having seen this movie before.  Maybe she hadn’t.

All day her shoulders ache terribly and the wings feel… well, they feel a bit like her hair does when she hasn’t washed it in too long.  Not pained but itchy and obscurely uncomfortable.  Maybe Spike can help with them.  Spike helped with Buffy’s hands and he did a good job, too.  She can feel the flesh in her hands itching a little as well, as it heals.  She thinks she’ll be able to remove the gauze tomorrow morning, provided she wakes up here, again, and not.  Elsewhere.

So as the sun is setting she tells Dawn she wants to go see him.

“Okay,” Dawn says.  “Let me leave a note.”

“You’re coming?”

“Unless you want me to stay here.”

Buffy looks at Dawn.  She liked when Spike was holding her hands yesterday, and the soft voice he used to speak to her, because it was kindly-meant and because it didn’t hurt her ears.  But Dawn had been there yesterday, too, and she doesn’t see why she can’t have both of their company at once.  “Okay.”

Dawn scrambles to write a note and then hustles to the kitchen to grab snacks, much to Buffy’s bemusement.

“Spike likes spicy stuff,” Dawn explains, “and sometimes I bring him some blood if I come by.”

Buffy thinks something about that could be bad, but she can’t tell what it is, so she lets it go for now.  Plenty of time to figure out how people think again, later.

They set out.  The world is strange, so Buffy links arms with Dawn, who is so transparently pleased by this that Buffy vows to do it again, too.  The world is strange, but making Dawn smile is still very good, she confirms.

“Do you feel up to fighting?” Dawn queries as they make their way down Revello Drive.

“Will I have to fight?”

Dawn shakes her head.  “Probably not?  Things are usually quiet a little bit after a big battle.”

A big battle.  The world is strange, so that it’s only now Buffy realizes it’s stranger than she remembers.  There is trash and junk blowing around in a few places, even though Sunnydale is usually nice and neat.  It looks like a few… boxes-on-sticks (mailboxes!) have been knocked to the ground.  As they walk, she can see fire damage on one property, with a tree and nearby shrubs scorched.  She thinks both plants will likely survive if they are pruned back.

“On account of all the jostling for position,” Dawn continues to explain.  “So we have a few quiet days ahead, I’d say.  But, y’know!  Just in case, I was wondering.  Should we run if we see a vampire, or would you be okay to stake it?”

Buffy remembers she kills things for a living, here.

That is a bad feeling.

“I think I can if I have to,” she decides.

That is also a bad feeling.  Being able to but not wanting to but there is no one else.  “Chosen,” she says unhappily.

“I, I can do it, too!  Spike’s been showing me some moves.”

Buffy shoots her a glance that feels very automatic; it isn’t a decision she is making at all, what to do with her face.

“Only on training dummies!” Dawn squeaks.  “It’s not like he takes me to graveyards to hunt.  He knows you’d kill him.”  She winces.  “Would have.  Killed him.”

The feeling this gives is a complicated one.  Buffy thinks she likes the picture of Spike showing Dawn how to stake a vampire in the back room at the… store.  (Magic Box.)  It is sweet and good.  It is Spike being kind and Dawn being smart enough to let him teach her.  But it is also a bad feeling, because it means there are vampires and the forces of darkness, here.  It means Dawn could get hurt.  And, even deeper: it means Spike knows Dawn could get hurt, because Buffy got hurt, and as far as he knew, she was gone forever.  She remembers his voice calling Dawn from downstairs at the house on Revello Drive.  She was focused on how the sound made her feel, then, not on the feelings in Spike.  But now she plays it back in her mind, she hears the sheer, screeching terror under the show of anger.  He thought Dawn might be gone, like Buffy was gone.  And then she sees his face, his eyes, the way he looked at her like she was the Second Coming.

Turning and turning, the widening gyre.  She isn’t sure where that thought comes from.  She has heard this somewhere and it has the same feeling as when she first arrived in this world and her wings were flailing all around her and they hurt and she didn’t know what they were and the air was thin and getting thinner and her hands hurt and she was all in black and there were demons, demons everywhere and oh, no, she’d been kicked out, and the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

“Buffy?”

Buffy blinks.  She is not in the coffin.  She is also not surrounded by demons, or mere anarchy.  Dawn’s, her sister’s, arm is tucked in hers and they have reached Restfield.  Restfield, where Spike is.  Buffy nods at Dawn and hopes she is being reassuring.

They pick their way among the graves.  It’s not technically sunset, yet, but the shadows are very long.  Dawn gives a little rhythmic rap on the crypt door.  (Shave and a haircut… two bits!  What is a bit? Buffy wonders.  Money, she guesses?  But that’s what Spike calls Dawn, sometimes—)

The door opens.

Spike’s gaze flares.

She slips past him and Dawn follows her inside.

“Hey, Spike!” says Dawn.  “We brought snacks!”

“You didn’t have to come by here,” Spike says, awkwardly.  He’s ruffling his hair.  “I was ready to come to you.”

Buffy looks up.  “You were?”  She gazes around.  She’s pretty sure… “It’s… different.  This is… different.”

“I got furniture,” he says, and gestures.  “You should see the downstairs; it’s quite posh.”

Buffy recognizes he has moved his hand in the direction of a nearby chair which, despite the verbal cue about downstairs, means he would like her to sit there, now.  She is pleased with her successful deduction.  She lowers herself and winces.

Spike lowers himself to perch across from her, and then it’s just the three of them: Spike, and Dawn, and Buffy.

Buffy breathes out for what feels like the first time all day.  She feels her lips curl.

“Hullo,” Spike says, quiet and wondering, then shakes his head, chuckling.

“See?” Dawn tells him.  “No disappearing.  I kept good hold of her.”

“Good job,” Buffy says.  She can tell she’s still quieter than Dawn, but her voice is closer to her head than Dawn’s voice, and it all still hurts.  Though—she thinks a little less today than yesterday.  She shifts her shoulders.  That’s worse, she thinks, not better.

“Hurting, luv?  I mean,” he course-corrects.

Buffy stops him.  “You can call me whatever you like.”

Spike blinks.  “I—what?”

Buffy looks at him.  His eyes are shiny, a little, and the inner edges are red.  She thinks he’s been crying.  “I know you’d only call me nice things,” she explains.

“Oh.  Ah.  Buffy,” he tries again, “are your wings still all ruffled?  D’you need—d’you want a little help?”

He says it!  Wings.  He says it aloud.

This is why you keep a vampire around, Buffy decides.  She’s been very clever about this.

“Yes, please,” she says, and pulls the wings forward. 

Dawn gasps a little, but then approaches, which is basically how she responded the first time she saw Buffy’s wings: surprise and then intrigue.  Buffy doesn’t mind.  They’re surprising and intriguing.

“Can you extend ‘em?”

Buffy stretches.  Oh!  Bad-but-good.  Like stretching after a too-intense workout.  She feels the wings shudder a little and turns her head to watch them do it.  It’s strange and cool.  They’re giving a little all-over tremble, like a human person who’s had a nice hands-over-head stretch, a delicious one.  Buffy has remembered another good thing about having a body!

She turns to share her joy with Spike, but the vampire is frowning at the state of her wings.  “Bit, go downstairs an’ get the cleaning bucket.  There are some fresh rags inside.  We gotta brush all the dirt out.  Then I’ll show you a few things.  Dru used to… keep birds,” he says with a funny twist of his mouth.

So Buffy turns to face the back of the couch and extends her left wing.  Spike shows Dawn how to work the dirt out with a dry cloth.  As they go, they straighten ruffled feathers, pulling oil down from the base of the feathers to their tips.  It’s lovely.  It’s like getting her hair brushed, if her hair had been tangled for a few months instead of a day.  They’re both careful, attuned to her little flinches and sighs of relief, so it goes faster than Buffy could ever have predicted.  She tends to the tip of the right wing as they work on her left, and then they switch.  By the end, she’s practically purring.  When Dawn announces they are all done!, Buffy throws her arms around Dawn’s neck and mantles her wings around her.  Dawn’s squeak is surprised but also delighted, which is Good.  Buffy turns, grinning, to Spike, who clears his throat.

Right.  She’s not supposed to hug Spike. 

Darn.

But Buffy’s wings have a mind of their own; they rise to mantle around him, too, even though they never touch him.  As their shadows fall over Spike, he looks up to see them all around him and something in him goes abruptly quiet, intent on her.  Perhaps that’s because the wings create a little cave in which they can look at each other, and the impression of privacy.  She knows her wings don’t actually glow, but in the darkness of the crypt, their whiteness lights up Spike’s face, a little.  Spike's eyes are wet, again, and she thinks his grief may have to work its way out of him bit at a time.  She reaches out with one, bandaged hand and presses her paw to the side of his face.  That should be allowed, surely, since it’s no worse than holding hands.

But she’s messed up, because Spike takes in a shaky, shuddering breath he doesn’t need and claims her hand with both of his, and it feels like a correction.  Buffy frowns.  Her wings disappear.

Dawn either doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss, or wants it to pass them by.  “So.  Wanna watch the next Thin Man movie?”

Buffy realizes for the first time that there is a television in Spike’s crypt.  “Spike,” she says, slowly, “did you… did you do all this for Dawn?”

Dawn looks surprised.

Spike shrugs, uncomfortably.  “Not just for Dawn.”  He sniffs.  “Like a bit of telly myself, of an evening,” he says.  “An’ like my blood to stay fresh, so the mini-fridge is only sensible.  An’ I mean, I can want a thing to look nice, can’t I?”

Buffy feels her eyes go all warm.  “Yes, Dawn.”  When Dawn looks puzzled, “the movie,” she adds.

Spike clears his throat and fusses around for at least ten minutes ensuring there is enough seating and they’re all comfortable, although Dawn has to squeeze in beside him on the loveseat.  It doesn’t look like either of them mind.  Dawn tucks herself next to him and rests her head on his shoulder.  Spike curls an arm around her.

It looks nice.

It looks warm.

Buffy’s been a little cold ever since she came back.

Technically she knows Southern California is warm.  Hot, even.  It just doesn’t feel that way.

She decides she is going to have to get Spike and the others used to Buffy touching him.

Then it won’t be so weird, and she’ll be able to hug him whenever she likes.

Pleased with her plan, Buffy curls up in Spike’s one, remaining chair, and does her best to focus on the story.  It’s hard, but rewarding: she laughs four more times.

Water is in the basement.  Lots and lots of water.  Water does not belong here, in a basement location.  Water goes in lakes and rivers.  Sometimes, it comes from the sky.  In smaller quantities, it belongs in sinks and toilet bowls, dishwashers and showers.  She is relatively firm on this.

Buffy knows she doesn’t have money-money.  So she’s armed with a wrench and Dawn’s exciting color commentary.

“Buffy.  Buffy?”

Buffy realizes she’s been following the path of the water through the pipes with her gaze.  There’s something wrong in the path of it.  It is not only that it is broken.  It is that there is a buildup of pressure… there.  If she tightens it here, it will break elsewhere.  Multiple elsewheres.  She can feel it.  “Dawn, get a bucket,” she says with a sigh, and climbs the stairs.  “Just set it under the leak for now.”

“Got it,” Dawn agrees, and heads for the kitchen.

Xander is standing in the living room when she emerges.  “Buff?”

Buffy looks at him.  “There’s a way to turn off the water for the whole house.  Right?”

“Uh.  Yeah.  Why?”

“Do you know how to do that?”

“Yes…”

“Okay.  Can you do that?  And then, can you get someone down to the basement to see how much it would take to replace all the pipes down there?”

Xander is looking at her the way they all have been the past two days: worried, puzzled, with a side of unsettled.  “All of them?  It’s just one leak, I can go see—”

Buffy puts her hand out and it lands on Xander’s chest.  “The pipes are very old,” she says.  “There are multiple weak points.  If I increase the pressure in the system by tightening that pipe, then the weakest point will crack.  Maybe a few weaker points.”

“Okay, Ryoga,” Xander says, and Buffy has no idea what that means.

“So I think we need to replace all the pipes.  But first, we need to turn off the water.”  Buffy has tried speaking in short, declarative sentences to her friends.  This seems to make them even less likely to understand her, or do as she asks.  She’s not sure why.  It is like the pipes.  There are all these points of weakness.  But these, she doesn’t understand.

Xander goes off to call someone named Tito, but since it’s not an emergency he opts to come tomorrow.  Buffy sighs.

“Buffy,” says Willow.  “I know you’re trying to get on your feet after…”

“Soaring from cloud to cloud.  With my harp?”

“Yeah, that,” says Willow.  “But, uh, these kinds of things tend to be expensive, and… there’s some money stuff we’re going to have to talk about.”

Buffy looks up to find that Xander, Willow and Dawn all look a little wary and shifty-eyed.  They lead her to a big pile of multi-colored papers.  Behind the troubled trio, Buffy can see Anya sitting at her mother’s old writing desk, working something out by hand.

Willow explains how bad it all is in these super-vague terms that Buffy can tell are supposed to help soften the blow, but mostly make her more nervous.  Just how bad is it?

“This house is hemorrhaging money,” Anya adds.  “Uh, Joyce hadn’t finished paying off the mortgage?  So each month the house is in your name, you have to pay that.  Even when you were dead and, and frugal, that money came out of your accounts automatically.”

Five months of mortgage?  “How much was that?” Buffy asks.

Anya gives her a businesslike little nod.  “So, all together it’s—”

“Ahn!”  Xander is inexplicably red-faced.

Buffy sees the puzzlement she’s feeling reflected on Anya’s face.  She stands and moves closer to Anya, curls her hand around Anya’s shoulder.  “No, go on, Anya.  I should know.”

Anya’s dark brown gaze slips between Xander and Buffy like she’s not sure who to listen to for a moment.  To Buffy’s pleasure, Anya’s calculations add up in her favor.  “So, the mortgage for five months was… seven thousand, six hundred and twenty dollars.  Your funeral cost about five thousand and twenty—”

“My funeral cost that much?!  Why bother?” Buffy huffs.  “I just got up again!”

“Five months later,” Anya reminds her.  “I don’t think I need to tell you what happens to a body five months after a—”

“Anya!” Xander snaps.

“Okay!” Anya says brightly.  “Moving on.  The hospital bills.  Those amount to around eight thousand, three hundred and—”

“Eight,” says Dawn.  “Thousand?”

She moves to the couch and sits, heavily.

“So, in total, that brings your brand-spanking new expenses list to,” Anya drawls, clicking on a handheld calculator, “just under twenty-one thousand dollars.”  She takes a breath.  “I’m afraid that leaves out the cable bill, the electric bill, the water bill… and so on.”

Buffy is abruptly glad she didn’t also flood the basement.  “So how much are we in debt?”

“Oh.  You’re not!” Willow says, waving her hands.

“You’re not,” Tara confirms, comfortingly.

Buffy doesn’t see what comfort this all is.

“Your mom had some money saved,” Willow says.

“And your mom’s life insurance covered the rest.”

They look self-satisfied, but still worried.

“So… how much is left?”

“Well, that’s the question,” Xander replies.

Anya taps a few more keys on her calculator.  “Three thousand dollars, on the nose!  Well, and twelve cents, but I don’t see what you can buy for twelve cents these days…”

Buffy does some very sad math.  That’s… two months of mortgage.

Assuming they don’t eat.  Or need water.  Or electricity.

She has a month to find a job.  That won’t interfere with Slaying.  That will support a mortgage and raise a kid?

She needs help.

She looks up.  “Willow, Tara?  How much are you paying in rent?  I think we have to raise it, whatever it is.  I’m really sorry.”

Anya tsks.  “They’re not paying rent, Buffy.”

“Well, o-obviously we were buying food,” Willow says, quickly.  Tara nods.

Buffy considers this.  They were looking after the house and taking care of Dawn and researching how to bring her back from the dead and going to school full-time.  But they aren’t doing half of those things, anymore.  “I see.  Okay.  What’s the going rate these days?”

“About eight or nine hundred for a roomshare this nice,” says Anya just as Willow, Xander and Tara all make noises of protest.

“I did say I was sorry,” Buffy says.  “But if we wanna keep the house, it’s what we have to do.  Unless you’d prefer we burn the house down and collect the insurance?  Of course, we’d destroy the last of mom’s things but on the bright side: fire, pretty!”

They stare.  Okay.  Either this wasn’t a joking matter, or Buffy hasn’t got her knack for humor back, yet.

That’s a shame, she thinks with a sinking sensation.  Everyone always used to say she was funny.

She tries again.

“Look, I get that it’s hard for you to go to school full-time and also have a part-time job.  But look at me!  I’m the Slayer full-time, and I’m going to have to get a job.  I’ll ask for seven hundred given you guys watch Dawn some of the time.”

Anya nods encouragingly.  “That is a really good deal,” she tells the room at large.

“Okay, Buffy,” Willow says, not looking pleased.  “We’ll help support you awhile.”

Buffy frowns.  “Wait, what?  No.  You’re paying to live here.”

“Well, it’s not like if we couldn’t pay, you’d kick us out,” Willow says.

Buffy raises her eyebrows. 

“Oh,” says Tara.

“Everything costs something on Planet Earth,” Buffy says, because she has just relearned this, but they have no excuse.  “Okay, Anya: what’s next?”

“Well, are there any other sources of money you could tap into?  Other properties you own…”

Buffy frowns.  “What about dad?”

“Your father,” Xander says, slow.

“Well, yeah,” Buffy returns.  She frowns, thinking hard.  The time after Joyce died is a total blur.  “Did Dad come to the funeral?”

“No, Buffy,” Dawn says, quiet.  “He, uh.  He gave us a call.”

Buffy nods to herself.  “I remember Mom having to bug him for child support each month.  Right?”

“Yes, and he hasn’t paid any since Joyce died,” says Anya.  When everyone turns to stare again, she falters for a moment before digging through the papers on the desk in front of her.

“But I’m still a child!  And I need support!” Dawn squeaks.

Anya seems to find what she’s looking for, and hefts a paper packet in the air.  “See, your mom signed a Guardian Affidavit when you turned eighteen, Buffy.”

“W-what does that mean?” Dawn stammers.

“It means Buffy has the right to keep you, even though she isn’t your mom or dad, and your dad is living,” Anya explains.  “These are traditionally only expected to last six months but your mom put in a provision for it to last longer, and your dad must’ve agreed to sign it.  The thing that Joyce didn’t consider is that working around the purpose of one of these documents means that your dad has a way of arguing out of paying child support once Buffy took temporary custody.”

Buffy’s lips thin.  “How long would a court case take?  To make him pay up, I mean.”

Xander huffs a sigh.  “Anya doesn’t know—”

“Oh, they can last months.  Years, even.”

“So what you’re saying is, Dad owes us thousands of dollars in child support—”

“Three thousand, two hundred and—”

“But that it would take so long to get it that if we paid a lawyer starting now, and fought him for it, we’d probably lose the house, meanwhile.”

Anya winces.  “Yes.”

Buffy closes her eyes.  She pictures the pipes as her life on Earth, and the water is money.  Some money is leaking out into the bucket, but if she turns the pressure up via the lawyer, more money will leak out than she gains, at least in the short term.  She needs more water and she needs repairmen for the pipes that are her life.

“What about the Gallery?”

“Your mother’s business.  Yes, it went under,” Anya says.

“Okay.  Right, there was no one to—there was no one to pay taxes and things?”

Anya nods.  “Joyce did start the paperwork to sell it, but then the surgery went well and she was optimistic.  She never put it on the market.  They technically went bankrupt a few months after she died… but, I think, you were so busy with Glory…”

“Anya, how do you know all this stuff?” Willow presses.

Anya shifts in her seat.  “I read everything in the pile.  Didn’t you?”

“Uh,” says Willow.

“It’s really the same kind of thought process as crafting a Wish,” Anya explains.  “You have to find your way around all these obstacles until you determine the most distressing outcome!  Only… inside-out.”

“But what about all her stuff?” Dawn presses.  “All the things in the Gallery—some of those are worth tens of thousands of dollars, if you find the right buyer.  No way that was all sold off—”

“Good thinking, Dawn!” Buffy says, turning her attention back to Anya.

“Oh!  So that’s what this thing is.”  Anya walks over to the coffee table where Buffy’s bills are spread out in multiple, multi-colored layers.  “There is a recurring charge I couldn’t account for: thirty-nine dollars a month.  I think it’s got to be a storage unit.”  She claims a sheet of bright yellow paper and holds it up triumphantly to the light.

“Right!” Willow exclaims, her eyes lighting up.  “Remember, Buffy?  After… after your mom, Katherine came by and asked for permission to put the Gallery stuff in storage?”  Her face falls.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t remember ‘til now.”

“No, no,” Buffy says slowly.  “I didn’t, either.”  She looks up.  “Xander, Anya?  If I give you this address, can you go and take a look at what’s in storage?  And Anya—is it possible that some of your buyers and sellers at the Magic Box might want some of the tribal and, and mystical items?”

Anya’s lips part in surprise.  “Oh!  Yes, that’s good!”  Her features fall into thoughtful lines.  “Unless you make a big sale out of the gate, it’s still not going to do much good.  You need a job, and you need one right away, something that pays at least twice a month if not every Friday, or you won’t make it, even with all of this.  Given the basement.”

Buffy nods.  A girl couldn’t just pretend the basement wasn’t there… dripping.

“I-I could get a job!” Dawn offers.

“Dawnie, you’re fifteen,” says Willow.

“No, she’s right,” Anya chimes in.  “If Dawn gets an after-school job she could pay for the groceries all month, with a little clever budgeting!”

Xander clicks his tongue, shifting on his feet.  He looks irritated.  “Okay, Ahn, maybe you’ve given Buffy enough advice—”

“Why do you keep doing that?” Buffy queries.  She finds a little ire rising in her throat.  “Anya’s been giving great advice so far.”

“And I know what job you could get, too!”

Buffy turns to her.  A tingling is rising in her fingers and toes.

“You could start charging people!”

“…For… what?” Willow queries.

Anya’s bright smile takes in everyone: Willow and Tara, both looking distressed, to Dawn, and Buffy, and back to Xander, whose irritability is on the rise.  “For Slaying!” she exclaims cheerfully.  “I mean, you provide a valuable service to the whole community!”

Beside her, Xander draws a hand down his face, looking at the point of throwing himself to the floor in despair.

“So, I say: cash in!”

Buffy looks at Anya.  Anya is over a thousand years old, she thinks.  Quite possibly, Anya is imagining the way mercenaries were paid to protect villages, before there were things like centralized governments. 

“The issue there, is,” Buffy says, feeling her way forward, “that you can never tell if anyone you save might be carrying cash.  And you could even get in trouble, right?  If someone thought it was, like… a shakedown.”

Dawn nods encouragingly, but Willow, Tara, and Xander are staring at her like she’s lost her mind and, come to think of it, so is Anya.  What has she done, now?

“No, no,” Anya is saying.  “No.  Besides the issues you mentioned, that would also be quite an unreliable source of income.  Slaying things that are in the middle of attacking a human person isn’t exactly consistent work.  And don’t many of the people you save run off the moment you’re distracting the monster?  No, I mean the Watcher’s Council should be paying you.”

The tingling is running through Buffy’s whole body now.  Anya is, quite possibly, a genius.

“I mean, it kind of made sense they weren’t when you were a minor,” she goes on.  “Because they were paying Giles to look after you?  And he was using a lot of that to buy you books and weapons.  But now, his salary should really be going to you, considering he’s not even here, anymore.  Or, if you want to be nice, you could tell them they need to pay both your salaries.”

“Anya,” Buffy says, “would you accept a hug right now?”

Anya lights up.  “I would!”

Buffy wraps her arms around Anya and squeezes.  Anya’s hug is a little mechanical, but still very nice.  She’s only a bit surprised when her wings pop out and mantle Anya a little.  Anya’s eyes are wide when she steps back, but she’s still smiling, so Buffy figures it must be okay.

Chapter Text

Later, Willow and Tara return to their room and Xander goes into the kitchen with Dawn to get a snack.  Anya sits beside her on the floor by the coffee table and helps her organize all the papers and put them into little categories in one of Dawn’s old three-ring binders.  It takes awhile for her to explain each section and what it means, and for them to categorize the bills into any kind of order.  “The fun part,” she says, “is that you get to put big check-marks when you pay off each bill!  Or stickers; I could get you some stickers,” says Anya, and Buffy kisses her on the cheek.

Anya turns to Buffy.  She has the troubled look on her face that all of Buffy’s friends have been sporting since Buffy came back.  “Hey,” she says, softly, “I know it can be weird.  Being human, and then—not human.  And then human again.  I might not be so good at human things as Willow and Xander and Tara are,” she concedes.  “But if you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them.  And I promise I won’t laugh.”

Buffy ducks her head.  “I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

Anya takes a breath.  “Affection is the hardest, isn’t it?  To figure out, I mean.  It’s normal, but in certain places and times and with certain people, and in these very specific ways.  It’s just—Buffy from before wouldn’t have done it.  Buffy from before wouldn’t have hugged me, either, even though that’s more socially acceptable.  I think.”

“Was I mean to you, before?” Buffy asks, dreading the answer.

“Sometimes.  But mostly… just not very affectionate.”

Buffy nods thoughtfully.  “This is useful information.  All of this has been useful information.  Thank you, Anya.”

“You bet,” Anya says, and squeezes her hands.  “Buffy.  It’s gonna be okay.”

Buffy smiles at her, and it feels very real on her face.  “I think so,” she says.

“Hey,” Anya says, lowly.  “Now I’ve given you advice, could you—could you maybe return the favor?”

“Oh, yes,” Buffy says, putting on her best listening face.

“If—if there was good news.  Would you want to hear it?”

Buffy doesn’t understand the question.  “Of course I would!”

Anya grins, relieved.  “See?  I knew it!  Xander’s just—he just doesn’t want to share our good news because I think he’s not sure it’s really good, you know?  But it is!  Good, I mean.”  She turns to Buffy.  “Right?”

Buffy tilts her head down to gaze up at Anya.  “You’re very pretty and making no sense.”

“That’s just what Xander says,” says Anya, sighing loud.  “I just mean, because something bad and then weird happened to you, would telling you about a good thing be… rude or, or bad?”

Buffy considers.  “I don’t think I have as good a handle on what’s rude as I used to.  But if I’m the concern, I’d love to hear about something nice!  Promise.”

Anya’s smile goes a little wobbly in her face.  “Okay.  Okay!  I’ll tell him you said that.  Or—can you tell him you said that?  I’m pretty sure he’d think I tried to get you to say it, or…”  She shakes herself.  “My usual commission is twenty percent for antiquities, but since we’re friends and I know it’s an emergency, I’ll lower it to seventeen.  Deal?”

Buffy nods solemnly, and they shake on it.

“People don’t like it when I talk about money,” Anya announces.  “They won’t like it when you do, either.”

A little lightbulb feels like it goes off over Buffy’s head.  “Is that why everyone was so weird just now?  Because of money?”

“Mostly,” Anya agrees.

“But we needed to talk about it!  If I didn’t, we could be homeless!”

“But then you’re meant to speak about things in generalities and not use real numbers,” says Anya.

Buffy makes a sound like an enraged teakettle. 

“I know,” says Anya.  “It’s so… useless!  And time-wasting!  And useless!  But,” she says confidentially, “if you want to learn how to fit in with humans again, you have to relearn these things.  You used to know them, so I think it’ll be easier for you.”  Her lips twist.  “Even when I was human, I was really bad at not upsetting people.  I’ve always been… odd,” she says, though she says it in a bit of a different way so that for a second Buffy isn’t sure that’s the word she used.

“Do I want to fit in?” Buffy wonders.

Anya looks at her, and her face twists with pity.  “I fall on the side of ‘yes’,” she says.  “But I was all alone, so fitting in was all about survival.  I don’t think you need to, unless you feel like it.”

“But I like my friends.  I don’t want them to… I don’t want them to think I’m so weird they don’t want to hang around me, anymore.  Or… or think I’m dangerous.”

Anya doesn’t seem to have an answer for that, but she does have a lead.  “Ask Spike,” she suggests.  “I think he’ll have some good ideas.”

“Really?  Spike?”

Anya nods.  “He’s really weird, right?  Like, a really weird vampire.”

Buffy considers this.  Spike looks after Dawn and cooks and eats human food and watches black and white movies with her and stakes other vampires and bought a mini-fridge for his crypt, and held out against a Hellgod to protect a little girl.  Spike looks at her, the Slayer, like the worst thing that ever happened to him was that she died.  He is a very weird vampire.

“But he’s managed to become part of the group, even if he’s not incredibly popular,” Anya supplies.  “And he didn’t do it by being like everybody else.”

This is very good advice, again.  Buffy’s life has been quite literally transformed by Anya, today, in more ways than one, but she isn’t allowed to kiss her, even on the cheek.  “Can I pay you a consultancy fee?”

Anya beams.  “You’re the sweetest,” she says.  “You don’t have to do that, because we’re friends.  Y’know, I was on the fence, but you are definitely a bridesmaid.”

Buffy mouths the word, bridesmaid.

Anya’s eyes go wide.  She did not mean to say that word.  “SHH!” she hisses.

“Bridesmaid?” Buffy whispers.

“SHH!” says Anya.

Buffy’s body is out of her control.  She hears herself laugh, wildly, feels her throw her arms about Anya’s neck, and kisses her on the forehead, cheek, and chin.  They end up in a pile of limbs on the floor, Anya laughing, too.

Xander comes in from the kitchen to see what the fuss is about, Dawn on his heels, and Buffy reluctantly disentangles herself, expecting to see censure on Xander’s face.  But instead, he’s surprised, and then pleased.  He reaches out and Anya slaps a hand into his.  He pulls her to her feet and Buffy sees in his face how much he loves her, even though he also clearly thinks she and Buffy are both kind of insane.  The way they look at each other!  It makes Buffy happy just to see it.

“What are you two giggling about?” he says fondly, reaching out with his other arm to pull Buffy up.

Buffy likes Xander’s hand in hers as much as any of her friends’.  She only just remembers she isn’t supposed to lean into both of them to indicate how glad she is that they’re in love.

“SHH!” says Anya, and Buffy giggles again.

“She knows?” Xander hisses.  “Anya!”  But a smile is playing at his mouth, too.

“Knows what?” says Dawn.

Xander looks at each of them, one at a time.  “That I asked Anya to marry me.”

Dawn shrieks at the top of her lungs and Buffy stumbles backward, hands fluttering up to her ears.  She feels Anya’s hand encircle her wrist like a bracelet, and it grounds her so that she is able to lower her hands, even though Dawn’s voice is still shaking through her brain.  Dawn has leapt for Xander, who’s caught her up and is hugging her tight, swinging her back and forth.  Dawn throws her arms around Anya, next.  “Omigod!” she says.  “I gotta get Willow and Tara—can I go get them?”

Xander nods, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Are you happy?” Buffy says.

Xander grins, lopsided.  Nods.

“Xander.  I’m so glad.  I’m so glad,” Buffy says, earnest enough that he has to believe her.

He laughs a little.  “Yeah?”

She nods too.

“See, Xander?  See?” Anya is saying, elbowing him, and Xander is looping an arm around her neck to plant a kiss atop her head, saying, “yes, Anya, yes, you were right,” and she’s adding, “get used to it, buster”, and Buffy is so happy she could cry. 

And then Willow and Tara are downstairs and Xander is saying, “me and Anya are getting married,” and Willow’s face falls, and Buffy realizes oh, no, she’s miscalculated again, and she and Anya got so excited and Dawn got so excited that they sort of sucked Xander in to being all excited but Willow is not excited.  At all. 

Buffy sees Tara reach out for Willow’s forearm and squeeze.

“Married!” Willow repeats, which is not a good sign.  But then they’re saved by a knock on the door. 

Spike sticks his head in, and Buffy realizes they’ve been dealing with the bills all day and though Spike has his blanket, the shadows are long enough he ought to have had no trouble making his way here.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” he says dryly.  His eyes find hers immediately, automatically.  “Buffy.”

“Spike!” she says.  “Xander and Anya—they’re getting married!”

Bless him, Spike reads her face like a book, turns to the pair and says, “felicitations to the happy couple,” with every evidence of genuine feeling, followed by, “good on you, Harris,” which makes Xander first wary and then reluctantly, bashfully happy again.  The expression makes him look about five years younger. 

“Thanks,” Xander mutters, followed by, “but, uhh, what’re you doing here?”

Spike looks puzzled.  “You lot asked me to come.”

“Oh!” says Willow.  “You lot being me.  Me— I mean, I— asked Spike to come.”

“And as you know, my next question is ‘why’?”

“Oh, sweetie, don’t be unpleasant,” Anya orders.

Spike leans back on his heels.  “Yes, darling, don’t be unpleasant,” he says with a grin.  “Just here to keep an eye on the Summerses.”

“I’m still at ‘why’.”

“I like it when Spike’s here,” Buffy announces, and again, everyone stares.

“Too direct, Buffy,” says Anya.  “Anyway, enough about Spike!” Anya announces.  “I would like everyone to inspect my ring, now!”

“There’s a ring?” Dawn squeaks.

Anya fumbles in her purse and withdraws a ring box.  She puts the ring on and everyone oohs and ahhs over it, even Spike.  Willow seems to have had enough time to regain her equilibrium, elbowing Xander.

“Almost like you’re an actual grown-up,” she says warmly, and hugs him.

“Thanks, Will.”

Everyone gravitates to the living room and Buffy’s stomach gurgles.  She realizes she hasn’t eaten since breakfast.  Dawn shifts uncomfortably next to her.  “Even after all that money talk, I think we need to order a pizza,” Dawn admits.  “Can I order a pizza?”

“Sure thing, Bit,” Spike says and leans up out of the couch, digging in his pocket.  He passes her a wrinkled twenty.  “Go give ‘em a call.”

Buffy stares at him as Dawn darts off for the phone.

“Oh,” he says.  “That question was for you.”

Buffy raises her eyebrows.

“What’s she mean, all that money talk?”

Buffy sighs.  “Later.  Let’s just let them enjoy this, for now.”

“Not looking good, eh?”

“Later,” says Buffy.

“You sound better,” he says, shyly.

Buffy looks at him.  Spike’s eyes are wide and very blue.  One of his hands—the one closest to her—twitches.  She frowns and scoots a little closer.

He looks very confused.

“I am,” she says.

“Your back feelin’ all right?  Haven’t seen you hitch those shoulders.”

“Getting used to it.  And straightening all my feathers the right way really helped.  Thank you.”

“Remember when Spike and Buffy got engaged?” Anya laughs, and the room falls silent suddenly.

“Yes,” Buffy says, rolling her eyes and swaying into Spike, like elbowing him in the ribs but with her whole body.

Her easy humor seems to snap the whole room back to normal.  Interesting: sometimes those awkward pauses are everyone checking to see if she’s okay.

“Oh, I don’t remember this,” Tara says.  “Was it a spell?”

“Got it in one,” Willow says, rolling her eyes.  “I apologized a lot, okay?”

“Never enough,” Spike mutters.

“Oh, please.  You were having the time of your life,” Xander shoots back, challenging.

Spike clears his throat.  “Well,” he temporizes, and the room bursts into heckling and laughter.

It hurts Buffy’s ears and brain but she smiles anyway because now everyone is making fun of Spike, but in a way that has him smiling with one half of his mouth.

“It was strange,” Spike says quietly, and looks at Buffy with his heart in his eyes.  “But it was no trial, even then, I’m man enough to admit it.”

“Is that what made you fall in love with me?” Buffy asks, and the room goes utterly silent again.

“No,” Spike says, lowly. 

No one says a word.  Buffy keeps her gaze locked on Spike.

“If you must know, it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to you.  Was right after I tried to have the chip removed, when Riley was ill.”

Buffy frowns.  “Who?”

No one answers.

“Who’s Riley?” she says.

Xander stands.  “Okay.  You.  Me,” he says, pointing at Spike.

Buffy whirls to stare at Spike, but the vampire is standing without protest.  The pair head out the back door, closing it quietly behind them.

“Buffy, you don’t remember Riley?” Dawn presses gently.  “Riley Finn?”

He springs into her mind fully-formed.  Tall, broad-shouldered, sweet at his core but insecure and not made for a Slayer.  Unable to keep up, incapable of playing second.  “Oh, yeah.  Riley,” she says, tasting his name on her tongue.  “We dated.  Sorry,” she says, even though she really isn’t.  Riley is a whole person and she hopes he’s okay, wherever he is; but she doesn’t want to see him.  He is not a person of hers.  She needed that space in her mind for other things.  But he’s back, now, taking up valuable real estate.  Oh, well.

Too, she now remembers what Spike was talking about.  That was the time in the Rolodex when Spike fell into irritating/amusing, sometimes bordering on infuriating.  He was an evil who could not do evil, which placed him into a category all his own.  She recalls about that time he started to say things like, “why won’t you leave me be?” and “why are you everywhere, Summers?” which she understandably read as rage towards a White Hat he couldn’t escape, but which clearly should have been interpreted differently.

It sounds like he fell in love very much against his will.  She wonders how that felt.

“Did I upset Xander?  Or Spike?”

Willow’s gaze is trained on the back door, even though she can’t see it through the walls.

(Probably.  She is a witch.)

“Uh, no, I don’t think so,” Willow says, but she’s standing.  “I’ll just go check on—”

“Give them a minute,” says Tara, tugging at her sleeve, and Willow settles back down warily.

“Well!” Anya exclaims.  “That was a bit of a party pooper, huh?  Let’s be happy again! …Can we be happy, again?”

“We can be happy again in a minute,” Willow replies, gaze still trained at the back door.

The door opens again, and the two men file back in.  Now it’s Buffy’s turn to stand, because Spike’s head is ducked, and Xander’s hand is on the back of his neck, steering him.

Spike flops back beside Buffy, who can’t help herself; she opens one arm, and Spike turns his head into her shoulder and breathes out, slow.  She curls her arm to rest her palm atop his head, looking up at Xander in mute question.

But Xander’s lips only thin in reply.

Spike only stays with his cool nose pressed to the side of her neck for a bare moment before laughing a little brokenly and wiping under each eye with the heel of his hand.

“Now, can we be happy?” Anya asks, in a small voice.

Spike looks up and sniffs, hard, smiling at Anya.  “ ‘Course, pet.  ‘M sorry.”

“No.  No,” Buffy says and takes his hand.  “I’m sorry if I upset anyone.  I’m still—it’s all still coming back, bit at a time—that’s all.  I remember him, now.”

“You didn’t make Spike upset, Buffy,” Xander says.  “I did.  I didn’t mean to, but—look, it’s my fault.  I’m an asshole.”

Spike gives a disbelieving snort.

“Go on, say it.  You’ll feel better,” says Xander.

Spike looks up at him, red-eyed.  “You’re an asshole,” he says, gamely.

Xander reaches over and shoves him at the shoulder.  “Once more, with feeling.”

“You’re an asshole,” says Spike, but his lips are twitching.

Xander laughs a little.  “Everybody!”

And everyone, even Dawn, shouts, “you’re an asshole!” followed by peals of laughter.

“Okay, don’t get used to it,” Xander grouses, but even Spike is smiling again.

There’s a knock on the door.  “The pizza!” says Dawn, and leaps up to go pay.

“What did he say to you?” Buffy whispers under the cover of resumed chatter and Dawn clattering in the doorway.

“Nothing so bad,” Spike says, just as quiet.  “It’s just, I’ve been as messed up as when you left.  Maybe more.  Dunno why.”

“Release of tension,” Buffy offers.  “All that built-up hurt.”

Spike nods to himself, thoughtful.  Then his eyes go wide over her shoulder.

Buffy turns.

It is not the pizza man at the door.

Rupert Giles is holding his suitcase in one hand.  His face looks a little like Spike’s did when he first saw her.  She stands.

He sets his suitcase down and makes his way to her, steps speeding until they’re a handsbreadth away.  “Oh, god, Buffy,” he says, shaking his head like he can’t believe she’s really there.  “You’re alive,” he says, and then he reaches for her and—oh!  She gets to do this.  She’s allowed to hold him.  “You’re here!”

She closes her eyes.

Giles.

He smells like wool, and books, and that cologne he always wears, and stale airplane air.  She fits into his arms like the space was carved out for her.

Everything is going to be okay.

Chapter Text

Spike feels like something inside him has splintered, and sharp things are embedded in his guts, shifting against one another when he moves, slicing him up inside.

‘Cause it’s too good to be true, isn’t it?  Buffy back, and unseelie, and strange.  But intact and basically happy, and newly fond of him?  He failed the Slayer.  He doesn’t deserve her regard.

Maybe it isn’t his luck.  Maybe it’s hers.  Maybe the Powers that Be want to give Buffy something for all her hard work, something to bloody well lean against.  Maybe it’s him.

He can hope for that.

But now he’s face-to-face with Giles, the girl’s father in all but name, having to put a good face on things, and so of course he’s a wet-eyed, stammery wreck.  Dawn’s made her way to him, to stand quietly beside.

“It’s all right,” she says, slipping her hand into his, and he nods at her, wiping at his face again just to be sure it’s free of tears.  But for now, Giles only has eyes for one person in the room—possibly in the whole world.

“Willow told me,” Giles was saying to Buffy, “but I didn’t really let myself believe it.”

“I take a bit of getting used to,” Buffy explains.  “I’m still… getting used to me.”

There’s a second knock on the door.

“The pizza,” Dawn explains, and slips free of Spike’s grip to get it.

That prompts a reshuffling of their cast of characters.  They array out in the living room and set the pizza boxes down on the now-cleared coffee table.  Tara and Dawn grab plates and Spike manages to pull himself together enough to recognize that they’ll need napkins.  When he sets a stack down beside the pizza boxes, he can feel Rupert shooting him a glance but doesn’t bother looking at him dead-on and determining what kind of glance it is.

Of course, he doesn’t have to.

“What is Spike doing here?” Giles queries.

Spike clenches his jaw, opens his mouth, but Willow says, “I invited him.”

He looks up at her, but she is very carefully keeping her attention on Giles.

“Spike helped out with Dawn, y’know, while Buffy was gone.  And now—Buffy's really more settled when he’s around.”

Bloody hell.  Spike opens the box of pizza and plates up a slice and hands it silently to Red, for something to do with his hands.

Willow bites her lip and takes it.

“That’s true,” Buffy’s saying in that new, quiet voice of hers.  “I guess, when I died… my last thoughts about Spike was that I trusted him to look after Dawn.  And… he did.  So… Spike makes me feel…”

Spike could die a happy vamp, just now.  So that he doesn’t do something mad, like hug Buffy, or start sobbing, he starts plating the pizza for everyone and just passing it off to Dawn, who walks the plates around the room.

“Well?” Rupert says, and for the first time, Spike turns to face him.  “Do you still speak at all?”

Spike opens his mouth.  “Not on cue,” is what pops out.

Tara huffs a shallow breath.  Spike recalls men raising their voices might have some unpleasant associations for Glinda.  Rupert’s attention follows Spike’s, a beat behind.  To Spike’s relief, he drops the antagonism like old news, and turns love and relief onto Buffy, and everyone seems to relax a hair.

Spike makes his way over to Red and Glinda.  “Thanks,” he tells Willow.

She doesn’t pretend to not know what he means.  “Well, I did invite you.  And who’s he to march in, all take-chargey?  He’s the one who left!  He left us,” she murmurs sadly, and Spike lifts a hand to—what?  Pat her on the shoulder?  But Glinda’s already seen him lift the arm so he’s got to do something with it, and he’s not so much of a berk he’s gonna pretend he was just adjusting his hair.  So he does pat her awkwardly.

Like a man.

Willow looks up at him, rueful.  “Thanks.”

“You ready to take y’r licks?” he asks.

“Um,” says Willow, tossing a glance at Tara. 

“Take your licks,” Spike pronounces more carefully.  “To get chewed out.  To be chided for steppin’ outta line, like a witch just outta her first pointy hat.”

“Hey, I ensouled a vampire when I was sixteen,” Willow shoots back, professional pride stung.

“You what?” He can’t have heard that right.

Willow looks at him askance.  “You didn’t know that?  First real spell I did.  Angel.”

“First,” Spike repeats, staring at her.  He’s remembering little Willow when he first met her.  “Bloody buggering fuck, Red.  Raising the dead just a weekend project for you, then?”

Willow deflates.  “No,” she murmurs.  “No, it was.  Hard.  I, I had to search a long while for something that wouldn’t.  You mentioned consequences.  Well, some spells are—uh, their consequences are, are worse than others.  And once I had a spell where, where the consequences were… something I could live with.  Um.  Then I needed the ingredients, and they were hard to come by.”

“But you were up, an’ walkin’ around the next day.”  Spike envisions her in her little blue shirt tied at the throat.  “It barely phased you.”

“You’re kinda making me nervous.”

“Look who’s talkin’!” Spike hisses at her.  “Where do you get that kinda power?”

“I, I don’t know,” Willow hedges.  “Maybe… living on the Hellmouth so long?  Maybe… being around the, the Slayer?”

Spike shakes his head at her.

“You really think Mister Giles is going to yell?” Tara stammers.

“Hell, if Dawn did it, I’d shout the walls down,” Spike admits, “if I thought it’d help her understand how serious a thing it was.”

“But I knew it was!” Willow hisses.  “I knew it and—and I would’ve done a-anything.  Anything,” she repeats, fervently.  “I, I did want to see if I could really do it, too,” she concedes after a moment.  “It was a rush.  And, and so scary, but that was part of what made it a rush, right?  The consequences if I was wrong?  You understand,” she said, and Spike does understand dancing with the devil, so he nods.  “But even if it had made me feel as low as a worm for a year, I would have walked through Hell to save Buffy… But I didn’t, did I?  I trespassed, in Heaven.”

“Y-you didn’t know.  W-we didn’t know.  Buffy even said.”

Spike tsks.  “But with power like that, couldn’t you have checked?”

Willow shakes her head.  “Dimensions are… fiddly.  Uh, I once made a metaphor about hitting a puppy with a live bee.  It’s not about power, in that case, it’s about… finesse.”  She sighs.  “Something I’ve always lacked in the magic department.”  She frowns.  “In the every department.  I am finesseless.”  Her jaw firms.  “Anyway, my knocks.  Yes.  I am prepared to take them.  On the chin, even.”

Despite her words, she looks terrified the way only a former A-student can.

“…don’t think he’ll be too mad, do you?” Willow queries, turning into Tara.

“…thinking of going the traditional burlap and larvae for the bridesmaids,” Anya’s saying earnestly to Dawn behind Spike; he half-turns to hear.  “But I’m pretty sure Xander will want something more modern, so I’m thinking acid green taffeta.”

“I say it’s your wedding, so you get to do whatever you want,” Dawn tells her solemnly.

Little chaos bomb, Spike thinks, fondly.

“…retroactively,” Buffy is saying to Giles on the couch.  Incredible; he thinks she’s convincing Giles to lobby the Watcher’s Council to get her a salary.  Atta girl!

…Where’s Harris?

Spike gives the room a scan.  He’s not worried about mystical consequences hitting one of the others, not at all.  Wouldn’t be the first time one of Red’s spells have gone all cockeyed, though. Just better go see what the boy is up to.  Maybe…

Maybe he’s on the back porch, having an actual panic attack.

“Oi,” Spike says casually.  “We takin’ turns?”

Xander tries to laugh while hyperventilating.  Goes about as well as one might expect.

“Wedding jitters?”

Harris still can’t reply, so Spike digs into his coat and lights up a cigarette.  He can’t remember the last time he had one… oh, yeah.  That night, with the Hellions.  He hasn’t put a cigarette in his mouth since he saw Buffy’s face.

That probably means something.

He blows the smoke away from Harris’s real estate.  He breathes in the night and peers at the stars.  “She’s a lovely girl, Harris,” he finally says.  “Take a breath.”

Xander shoots him a glare.  Looks like he’s about to disagree on principle.  Visibly lets it go.  “Yeah,” he says.  “I gave her a ring.  This is not the first real sign of commitment.  I don’t get it.”

Spike’s gaze swings back to the house, then to Xander.  “D’you wanna know what I think?”

Xander looks mutinous, but Spike waits him out. 

“…Yeah.  I.  Wanna know what you think,” Xander forces out between gritted teeth.

Spike gestures back to the house.  “It’s them.  Your friends.”

Just then, as if the Powers That Be had lined up a cue, Buffy’s crystalline laugh cuts through the house, and a spate of conversation picks up to fill the air after.

“You’re each so afraid of what the other thinks,” Spike says.  “You, Red, an’ the Slayer.  You know Willow doesn’t approve of Anya, not really, an’ Buffy thinks she’s frivolous and selfish.”

“Things are so tense when Will and Anya are in a room together,” Xander agrees, the words bursting out like they’ve been held back too long.  “I’m, like, picturing that level of tension forever: for the rest of my life.”  He huffs.  “Always chiding Anya to cool it with her money talk so Willow doesn’t get to say it, first.”

“They’ll bond when you die,” Spike tells him, just to see Harris’s face do a few backflip contortions.  He’s got to get his fun in, somehow.  Then he imagines what powers Red might call on if Harris were to bite it, and Dawn’s grieving and Buffy’s, and he realizes even for his own part, he’d rather Harris die of old age.  If someone told him he got to choose, which they wouldn’t.

Spike pictures it: Harris, gone.  Not just out of the picture someplace else.  Dead.  Like Joyce.  Or killed in front of them.  Like Buffy.  He has to shake the thought out of his body physically, the way it makes his gorge rise, the sense of guilty failure that floods him.

He looks up to find Xander has been watching him this whole while.  Seeing whatever is written on his face.

“Oh, write it in the sky,” Spike mutters, blowing smoke away from them again.

“Wow, if past-Spike could see you, now,” Xander says, but it sounds like he’s teasing on autopilot.  He looks unsettled, eyes wide in the dark.

“He’d stake me an’ put me straight out of my misery,” Spike agrees.  Then laughs a little.  “But I know something he doesn’t.”

Xander looks at him askance.  “You know a lot of things he doesn’t.  Being future-you, and all.”

“Berk,” says Spike.  “No.  That I get to be happy.”  He shoots Harris a glance sharp enough to cut, through narrowed eyes, and points with his cigarette.  “‘Cause she’s alive, an’ I get to see it, so don’t you start.”

“I’m not,” Harris says, holding up his hands.  “I wasn’t.”

“Right,” Spike says, and they fall into silence, again; but it doesn’t last. 

“It true Red ensouled Angelus.  At sixteen?”  He can hear a clatter, a characteristic patter of steps.  “Speak o’ the devil.”

Willow tumbles out onto the porch.  “There you are.  Glad you didn’t kill each other.”

“Greetings, oh great and powerful Oz,” Xander intones.

“I think he’s still in Tibet or something,” Willow grouses.  She’s wrapping her arms around her guts, again.

“You get that talking-to?”

Xander tics his head to the side.

“Watcher,” Spike explains.  “Gonna take her over his knee.”

They both glare at him.

“That sounds more fun,” says Willow.

“Ooooh,” says Spike.  He licks his fingers and pinches his cigarette out, pockets the end.

She shoves him a little while he’s still doing it, making him stumble.

“Why was Giles yelling at you?”

Willow looks up sardonically, lip curled.

“Oh.  Right.  Messing with the forces of nature.  Very bad,” Xander agrees gamely.

Spike slaps his palm to his forehead.  “Christ.  You lot.”

“I was gonna grovel,” Willow explains.  “I’m very good at groveling, I get an A-plus in bow-and-scrape!  Only, I didn’t.”  She squinches her eyes closed.  “I think I might’ve threatened Giles.”

Spike feels his gaze flare, a grin making its way across his features.  “Y’what?”

“It’s just,” she says, peering through her fingers, “He was treating me like a child, and I brought Buffy back!  Me, I did it!  With your help,” Willow says, nodding in Xander’s general direction.  “And he called me a rank, arrogant amateur.”

“Well, pet, it sounds like he threw the first stone,” says Spike.

“I mean, he did, but…”

“Threatened, threatened how?” Xander manages.

“Uh, I said that if I was so powerful maybe he didn’t want to piss me off?”

Spike grins at her.

“Uh,” says Xander.

“But do you think he’s right?  Do you think I’m, I’m rank?  And arrogant?”

“You smell just fine from here, luv,” says Spike.

Willow screams into her hands.

Spike tries the patting-on-the-back thing again.

Willow’s face is a picture of misery and doubt.  “I’m serious!  He was very serious!  What do I do?”

“ ‘Bout which part?” Spike queries.  “The part where you launched a rescue mission against God?  Or the part where daddy’s mad at you?”

“Both!  Of those things,” says Willow, petering out at the end.

“Well, reckon you apologize to the old man,” Spike says.  “That part’s easy enough.”  He thumbs his nose.  “Dunno about the God part.”

Willow looks to Xander, but Xander’s lost.  Spike figures this is pretty far outside of the realm of settling a joist or replacing a windowframe or whatever else it is that Harris does.  So she turns back to Spike.

“You must’ve met some pretty powerful people,” she hazards.  “H-how did they stay on an even keel?”

“Didn’t.  Most of ‘em were evil.  Or insane.  Or both.”

“Unhelpful, Spike,” says Xander.

“Maybe,” Willow says. “Or maybe… indicative.  Y’know.  The whole: absolute power corrupts absolutely thing.”  She looks glum.  “What do you do when you’re an expert but you’re also somehow new?”

“Slow down, I guess?” says Spike.  “Let yourself become a bit less new.”

Willow nods.  “That’s…  Yeah, okay.”  Her lips compress.  “But.  Apology now.  Can you come?”

Xander nods.  “Sure thing, Will.  All for one and one for all!  And all of that.”

“…Spike?”

Spike looks up to find they’re both in the doorway.  He believes he’s about to get his second thank-you from Willow Rosenberg, but instead, she says,

“…Are you?  Coming?”

“Oh, me,” Spike says, slowly.  “I mean, yeah, what’ve I got better to do.  There may be some very polite curse words, we play our cards right.”

Willow gives him a sickly little smile and precedes him into the living room.

Socializing is weird, but nice.  Buffy has a distant memory of liking it, being good at it.

She is not as good at it, anymore.  It feels like eons passed since she made ‘small talk’ at a party.  But she does still like it.  People, that is.  Giles especially.  So she gamely mouths the script, just to see his eyes crinkle and his lips move and his voice emerge, low and rumbly and good, as Dawn and Anya enthuse quietly about wedding decor; Tara has begged off, as she has an exam tomorrow morning.

“I took an apartment in Bath,” he tells her.  “Met up with a few old friends.  Almost made a new one, which is supposed to be statistically impossible for a man of my age.”

A new friend.  Buffy takes this to mean ‘lover’.  Ah, someone who was almost a lover, and not quite.  Still, a good effort, she deduces.  Giles was ‘putting himself out there’. 

“And you?  How are you… really?”

Buffy realizes he is not just asking her to make himself feel better.  “I’m… okay.  I think.  Everything’s an adjustment.  Lights, sounds, fabric, words.  People.”

Giles’s brow furrows, just a hair.  Like Spike, he has a way of putting all his focus on one thing, in this case, Buffy.  Like Spike, he’s smarter than most people, so that focus is a lot.  “Can you tell me what you remember?”

Buffy blinks at him.  This question is very open-ended.  One might say it’s a sack with no bottom.  Then she realizes that this is like Spike mentioning the downstairs but gesturing to the chair.  Giles has asked something open-ended, but he wants something specific, and he’s probably pointing to something specific.

Oh: Riley.

“Of course I don’t know what I can’t remember,” Buffy fills in with a little self-deprecating humor.  “But…”  She thinks of Dawn coaxing her off the streets, of Spike and the Rolodex of Memory.  “I think I’ve got all the important pieces.”

“I’m glad,” Giles says slowly, but his brow is furrowed.  Either she has said something wrong, or he is still very worried.  Both seem equally likely.  “Buffy, you seem...”

Buffy tilts her head to the side.

“…Remarkably well-adjusted.”

“Oh.  Well, Dawn and Spike help,” Buffy says.  “And Anya.”

Giles blinks.  “Er.  Dawn, Spike, and… Anya.”

“I just mean, Dawn makes sure I eat three times a day—I keep forgetting.  And Spike bandaged my hands—I had to claw my way out of my coffin, which was very—and Anya’s helped a lot with money.  Anya is very good with money.”  Buffy makes an effort to be fair.  “And it did me good to hear Xander’s and Anya’s cheerful news.  And Willow and Tara are going to pay rent from now on!”

“Yes, all very good things.  It’s only… Buffy.  Spike… he’s been very… useful, I’m sure, but… you must remember.  He’s a vampire.  He hasn’t got a soul.  Whatever he was after with your sister, your friends, it was more likely a reliable outlet for violence than out of any genuine desire to do good.”

“Um,” says Buffy, because every second piece of that doesn’t parse.

Luckily, that’s when her friends return en masse.  Buffy’s gaze flicks over each of them.  Willow looks pale and nervous, but when doesn’t she, these days?  Xander looks grim.  Spike looks vaguely amused, but she notes he’s kind of—keeping an eye on Willow and Xander, too, and trying to look like he isn’t.

She guesses he did a lot of that kind of thing during the summer she was gone: looking out for her friends while trying to look like he was doing nothing of the sort.  It makes a sort of warmth blossom in her belly, both the being-good part and the hiding-it part.

“Uh, Giles?”

Giles looks up, features distinctly cool.  But he isn’t looking at Spike with that face, as Buffy half-expects.  He’s looking at Willow.

Maybe Buffy doesn’t remember things so well as she thinks?

Willow wrings her hands a little, in front of her.  “I’m sorry I—”  Her wobbly lip firms.  “I’m sorry I snapped at you back there.”  She darts a glance back at Spike, then Xander.  “I did a… really big thing, and… well, it makes sense you’d be… troubled.”

Buffy turns to look at Giles, who’s blinking in surprise.  “What’s this about?” she queries.

“Watcher kicked at Red for bringin’ you back,” Spike says.  “Red kicked back.”

“Spike summarizes in his inimitable way,” Giles drawls. 

Spike arches a brow.

“Well, that is the gist of it,” Giles relents.

Buffy feels her lips thin.  “You’re… mad I’m back?”

“No,” Giles says immediately, automatically, and something acidy and twisted in Buffy’s stomach unclenches and unwinds.  “No, Buffy, of course not.  But—but it’s a perversion of the natural order to bring someone back from the dead.  Much less a Warrior of the People, like you.  The cost is…”

“There’s no cost too high,” Dawn cuts in.  “Unless it’s end-of-the-world stuff, where, like, if we brought her back she’d have no place to live.”

“And she died for you, so you’re particularly motivated to reverse that particular travesty, aren’t you?” Giles snaps—and it’s so automatic that Buffy knows he means it.

Dawn rears back, and Buffy stands before she knows she’s done it.

And her wings are out.

They’re not out like they’ve ever been out before.  They’re extended their full length and each feather is bristling with indignation.  They look half again as large as usual; Buffy can see them out of the corner of each eye.

Giles is staring, like the others stared.

But he’s also gone white, and his hands are also trembling, and he’s looking at her like—

Like she’s not Buffy.

Her wings wilt a moment before rising again, more-or-less normal-sized, now.  “Don’t say that to Dawn.  After our dad abandoned us, and mom died and I died, and you beat tracks, of course she wants someone back in her corner.  Dawn’s doing great, by the way, no thanks to you.”  Buffy wills the wings away, only because she thinks she might whack him with one.  She settles for clenching her fists.

“Buffy,” Giles huffs, like he’s fallen from a great height; like he’s had the wind knocked out of him.

“I may not be right in the head,” Buffy goes on, grimly, “but I can see this much: you split when the going got tough, just like every guy I’ve ever known.  With rare exception,” she adds, for Xander’s and Spike’s sakes.  “They still needed you—”

“I wasn’t their Watcher!  I was yours!” Giles shoots back.

“You were our family!” Willow shouts.  “You left to, to grieve, alone, and I, what was I supposed to do?”

There’s a beat of silence in which Spike shifts on his feet, then blurts, “kids were lost, but they wanted to keep fighting the good fight, an’ I figured, what the hell, it’ll keep ‘em busy—”

“Hey!” said Xander—

“—but it was…”  Spike’s features squinch in what looks like confusion, and he casts about the room: Anya and Dawn on the couch, to Willow, to Xander, who’s vibrating in place, and back to Buffy and Giles again.  “Fighting was how they chose to grieve, their way of... honoring her,” Spike says with this strange, clipped formality.  “But they’re not the Slayer.”  He shakes himself.  “And none of us are you.  So… if you wanted a say in how we did things ‘round here, you should have stayed.  You lost your right to call the shots when you ran.”

Anya issues a low whistle.  “What?” she says when some of the others turn to stare.  “No one does a Reason You Suck speech like Spike.”

Spike quirks a half-smile in her direction but doesn’t take a bow or lord his win over Giles like Buffy half-expects.  Instead, he’s looking warily at Giles.  Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When it does, it’s a doozy.

“And who are you to speak for them?” Giles returns.  “You’re a soulless monster.  The only reason you were making pretensions to altruism was because of Willow’s plan to return Buffy to the mortal plane.  You were biding your time.”

Spike issues a strangled little laugh.

“Spike didn’t know,” Willow protests.  Her features have gone intent and focused, even though she is still very pale.  “I made sure he didn’t.”  A sort of micro-expression of apology flickers over her face, like part of her wants to indicate to Spike or the others that she’s sorry; but her attention doesn’t really shift from Giles’s face.

“I’m sorry, Willow,” Giles says, and he doesn’t sound sorry, much.  “But it’s the only thing that makes sense.  If you didn’t tell him, he found out.  A vampire has no other reason to behave as Spike has.  Surely that’s clear enough.”

The room has gone silent.  Buffy would like to stand up for Spike, again, but there’s a ripple running through the room, and she would like to know what happens when the wave finally makes landfall.  Spike is shifting his weight like he’s contemplating doing a runner, himself, and his features are shifting from lost to resentful and back again, testing Buffy’s resolve.

But she holds.

“And now that she’s back, I’m certain he will take advantage of Buffy’s disoriented state—”

“Aaand we’re done!” Xander snaps, suddenly, advancing on Giles.  “Thank you for coming, goodbye.” 

“What?  Xander,” says Giles.  He looks indignant and confused, even as Xander herds him to the doorway.

“Also, what the fuck, he saved your life and my life and Buffy’s and Dawn’s and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you got here and yelled at Will for doing the fucking impossible and making a miracle, and what you said insulted not just Spike but also Buffy and kinda all of us?  We’re not the green cadets we were at sixteen, okay?  And Spike’s not even a very good liar.”

“Hey!” said Spike.  “Er.  I mean.”

“So—” and Xander pauses to check in with Buffy.

She nods, grim.

“—it’s time for rude people to find a decent hotel and try again tomorrow.”  And Xander manages to shoulder Giles out to the porch before they all sort of realize his suitcase is still just inside the doorway where he dropped it because he was so happy to see Buffy.

Buffy wishes she could teleport back into that moment.

Xander opens the door and hands the suitcase out, then fumbles in his wallet.  He passes over a few bills.  “A decent hotel,” he says to Giles’s shocked face, and closes the door again.

He rolls to lean against it.

“Well!” says Spike.  “Man of the house.”

“Maybe you are ready to get married,” Willow concedes.

Xander palms his face as Anya practically dances to his side.  “Did I yell at Giles?  I think I just yelled at Giles.”

“For Spike,” Spike says.

“For Spike,” Xander echoes, then rallies.  “Well, but not for Spike!  Or not just for Spike.  He basically called us all stupid and, and naive…?”

“And helpless without him,” says Willow.

“Yes, that too,” Anya agrees, plastering herself to Xander’s side.  “You were very, very sexy,” she says. 

“He looked… surprised.  By the wings, I mean,” Buffy finally says.  Her voice emerges small enough that Dawn squeezes her upper arm.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, and tucks her head under her sister’s.

“Didn’t you tell him?” Buffy queries.  “When you told him I was… alive?”

Willow looks uncomfortable.

“So you’re saying there’s a connection between Glory and Ben,” Xander blurts.

Spike’s eyes widen.  “You lot can’t talk about the bloody wings.  I knew it was something…!”

“We can,” Willow says.

“Kind of,” says Xander.  “I mean, obviously, if someone else is referring to them, we can… do the same.”

“And if they’re out!” Anya exclaims.  “Then it’s easy to.  But we couldn’t just... inform someone about them who didn’t already know.”

“Well, I’ll be,” says Spike.  “That’s just neat.”

He’s grinning to himself, and Buffy doesn’t think it’s about her wings at all.  The grin keeps going soft around the edges, soppier than she thinks he knows.

That’s lovely and wonderful and Buffy really wishes she could just… look at Spike’s face and be happy.  But unfortunately, there’s the everything-else of the night.

“Hey, so…” Spike is saying lowly.  His body is angled to Xander’s but he isn’t looking at him.

“Don’t mention it,” says Xander in return.  “Ever.”

If this were a sitcom, that’d be the tap of the drums and the cymbal or the musical sting, and the sweet awkwardness would end on a comic note.  But instead, Xander keeps looking at Spike, like Spike needs to give him one more thing before they’re done.  Buffy isn’t sure what it is.

Neither is Spike.  He looks up, first from under his lashes, but then he hitches his chin and meets Xander’s eye.  Xander’s gaze is searching and puzzled, Spike’s challenging.  But as Xander continues to just… look, Spike’s challenge melts away.

Buffy’s breath catches, and she hears Willow make a tiny, almost subvocal squeak.

Because Spike is pointing some stripe of the Look—the nameless, Buffy look—at Xander.  It’s utterly naked, all of Spike’s Spikeness on display, and suddenly Xander is saying, “okay, okay, Jesus, put that away.”

And Spike is smiling a little, in this sort of self-mocking way, and Xander says, “okay,” again, and then the moment really is over, and Xander is shaking out his hands, like Spike kind of subsumed him for a second and he needs to shake off the wet, and Buffy totally gets it.

“Hey,” Dawn says, as the others settle back into a sort of quieter socialization mode, Willow easing up to Spike and Anya chatting with Xander, “I hope you know he was wrong.  Like—yeah, guilt because I was supposed to jump instead of you.  Mountains.  I’m not even real, I could—I should’ve—”  She visibly changes tack, shaking her head.  “But that’s not why I’m happy you’re back, y’know?  I love you.  That’s why.”

“I know that, Dawnie,” Buffy says, and she does.  “And I would’ve been just as sad if you’d gone.  Maybe sadder ‘cause it’s my job to look after you.  So let’s not play would’ve-could’ve-should’ve, okay?”

“Okay,” Dawn says, and taps her head to Buffy’s shoulder again.

Spike moves through the rest of the gathering in a daze, and it’s only after everyone’s left and Dawn’s trundled off to bed that he’s able to speak with Buffy again.

“Pet,” he says.  Then, gathering himself, “Buffy.”

“Mm?”  Buffy turns to him on the couch.  She’s got these little shadows under her eyes, which are heavy-lidded from exhaustion, but she looks so pleased to see him.

She still looks so pleased to see him.

“I know it’s early yet, and you’re still finding y’r feet.  But I wanted to let you know that I still feel the way I did before.  I still love you.  I’m in love with you.  Even if you never want me, being able to talk to you, just like this, and watch your face and hear your voice—Buffy, you don’t know how often I dreamed we were talking, just talking.  It’s enough for me.  But if you can ever see your way to giving me a chance, I’ll be here.”

Buffy looks at him searchingly.  There is the tiniest furrow at her brow.

“And listen, you don’t have to say anything, now—”

That’s how far he gets before Buffy’s lips are on his.

Later he dissects it: her hand found his cheek.  Her eyes closed, her lashes feathering against those little shadows under each eye.  And then she pressed her lips to his, close-mouthed and sweet, before pulling back, eyes open and on his, checking in.

But in the moment, all he thinks is: Buffy.

“Oh,” he says—or something equally stupid.

She’s smiling, though.  “Yes, let’s—um.”  Her brow furrows.  “…Date?”

Spike laughs.  “Not quite right, is it?  ‘Date’, like we’re off to the sock hop.  We’ve known each other for years.”  He pauses to consider this.  They have.  They’ve known each other four years, been allies two.  He knows every expression that crosses her face, and what they all mean, all her hang-ups and peculiarities.  The way they weave together to make her, Buffy: inimitable, lovely, and fierce.  The best person in all the world.

“Let’s be together, then,” Buffy says, simply, and Spike could possibly dust.  And then her gaze flares.  “Is that what happened—you and Xander?  He was… giving you his blessing?”  She whacks him on the shoulder.  “You… neanderthals!”

“Just meant he isn’t gonna have you committed or stake me for existing,” Spike muttered.

“Aw, it was more of a general-acceptance wordless weirdness.  That’s kinda sweet!”

“Could I possibly kiss you again?” he whispers.

Great, mate, he thinks.  Go over all Williamish. 

But Buffy likes to be asked, it seems.  She smiles a little smugly, like Spike’s lips are no more than her due.  “Yes, please,” she says, and leans forward to plant another one on him.

Chapter Text

Spike awakens with a diffuse sense of urgent unease.  He’s late for something—Dawn?  Was he supposed to get her to school in the blacked-out DeSoto?  No, he’s—it’s the rest of ‘em, they’re hunting without him again, he’s got to—

No, not that, either.

Buffy’s alive.

Spike feels an idiot grin take over his face as tension drains from every muscle, eyes still closed.  He rolls over and shouts and laughs into his pillow.

Buffy’s alive, and Buffy’s kissed him.

Twice!

Spike rolls out of bed with more energy than he’s felt in years, bouncing into a pair of dark jeans and tossing a black tee over his head.  He grabs for shoes and socks—he’s going to see her.  He can’t wait to see her.

He flips through the past few years in his mind's eye, and it’s all Buffy: Buffy eyeing him with a strange admixture of friendly disgust when they’d first allied; her tentative openness and honesty when her mum was ill; her soft expression when Glory had beaten him bloody.  All still overlaid with wariness and doubt, up until those final moments.  To the end of the world.

She’d believed him, then.

He was sure of it.

But part of him is troubled she’ll revert to her old ways, and he’s sure this trip down memory lane is his brain trying to prepare him: remember.  This is what she’s really like.

Yesterday, Harris took him out to the porch and tried to tell him—very gently, for Harris—that Buffy wasn’t quite herself, yet, and Spike couldn’t take advantage, and he’d just—started to sob.  He’d muttered something about her being here, really here, and really her, and then—it is her, isn’t it, Xander?

And Harris, instead of laughing or scoffing had just said, oh, god, I sure do hope so, and Spike had cried a little more.

Yesterday was probably just a glitch—on both their parts.  Wedding got Harris all sentimental, like.  Or maybe the part where Spike had given Red some decent advice; or the part where Harris was having wedding jitters, and Spike wasn’t half-bad at making him feel steadier.  In any case, it’ll dissolve if he looks at it too hard, so Spike just... won't.

Spike realizes he’s frozen lacing up his boots and begins again, jerky and angry at himself. 

It doesn’t matter, anyway.  It doesn’t matter because Buffy finally saw he was there for the taking, and she took.  Who the hell cares what her friends think, now?

Spike’s just about managed to convince himself of that, to fill his brain with Buffy, and Buffy only, when he knocks on the door at Revello Drive, and Buffy opens it.

She’s wearing a neat, ivory hoodie with a loose weave and dark jeans, and her feet are bare, with a hot pink pedicure that’s indubitably Dawn’s work; Buffy lets her pick the colors, sometimes.  Spike gulps when Buffy's sweet face lights up in a grin, so clearly spontaneous that he wonders if she’s seeing someone else behind plain old him. 

Then she has him by the arm and is pulling him inside, and he thinks she’s gonna grace him with one of those kisses.  Maybe they could speed up a little past the pace of his Victorian upbringing, and even—

But instead, she’s leading him away from the door and pressing him to sit on the couch and she’s the one who sits on the coffee table so they can conspire.

And she is fit to conspire: her eyes are doing this twinkling thing, and her lip is curled like a cat’s, and her gaze darts ‘round the room a few times as if to be certain no one’s listening.  And the whole while there’s this air of mischief about her, one he remembers being an intrinsic part of the Buffy package way back when, an air that hasn’t been aired since Glory.

“You’re good with people,” is Buffy’s opening salvo.

Spike tilts his head at her, delighted and baffled.  “You’re tragically misinformed.”

She shakes her head, impatient.  “Anya said you know how to talk to people, even though you’re not a human person, exactly.”  She frowns, thinking.  “I’m a person, or I guess I am, but I’ve also been something else, and part of me still feels like something else.  I could use your advice.”

“About… how to talk to people.”

Buffy nods. “I can’t help but feel like if I’d said the right thing to Giles—or if, if I’d known what to say—”

“Now, don't be like that,” Spike says, and takes both her hands.  "You were yourself; Watcher was out of line."  He is no longer taking liberties, he registers, looking down at her hands, soft in his own.  They’ve kissed, and he has every right, now, to press her living hands between his dead ones.  Her fingernails are painted the same hot pink as her toes.  He wants to laugh—the color is absurd and it’s very not-Buffy—but he notes that her nails have been filed very short, and there are no hangnails, and deduces that this was Dawn looking after Buffy’s ruined hands, disguising it as bonding.

God, he loves that girl.

“I guess,” Buffy agrees.  “Anya said something like that, too.  That you knew how to be around people and still be yourself.  Even if yourself is very strange.”  She looks up at him, wide-eyed.  “I’m not totally clueless,” she rushes on.  “I know enough to say that I don’t mean it in a bad way, that you’re weird.”  Her gaze falls on their clasped hands, and she squeezes them.  “Obviously.”

“Okay,” Spike says.  He’s determined to help—of course he is, this is Buffy.  Buffy, back to them.  Buffy looking up with earnest want.  He’d pluck the moon down to give to her.

However.

He’d been earnestly helping with Dawn and with Fighting the Good Fight, but when Glory’s minions stole Dawn and Buffy’s brain took a little vacation, Spike had slapped Buffy to try and snap her out of her fugue and he was upset, and he knew he was saying non-humanish things, and the way they’d all looked at him then— Giles and Xander and Willow and Tara—he knew it’d undone all his hard work over the past year in a matter of minutes.

But Buffy’s not him.  She’s got a soul.  She’s just trying to get back into the swing of things.  He can help her. 

He will.

“You once said that it’s my ties to the world that have kept me alive.  You’re not wrong.  I need my friends, Spike.  I need my Watcher.”  She refocuses on him, on his face.  Squeezes his hands again, like punctuation.  “I think they’ll take a little time to get used to the new me, and that’s okay.  I just need to meet them halfway.”

So Spike nods, and thinks as humanish as he can, and makes his suggestions.

Buffy corners Dawn after school.  After asking a list of pre-prepared questions about schoolwork, she launches right into prepping Dawn for their get-together.

“Willow feels weird about bringing me back,” she says.

“As she should,” Dawn presses, looking grim for a girl her age, lips compressed and eyes wide.

“Yes, she should, but she’s also still my friend who thought she was rescuing me from a fate worse than death,” Buffy says firmly.  “So we’re gonna have a movie night but I’m gonna hang on Willow’s arm a little, pick things she likes.  But I don’t want you to think for a second that I’m ignoring you, or that you’re not important, too.  You and I have gotten a lot of great one-on-one lately, and that hasn’t been happening with Will.”

“Oh, please.  I’m not a baby,” Dawnie says, folding her arms.  But then she visibly relents.  “Thanks.  For telling me.”

“Awesome!  Thank you.  You’re the best sister.”

“Giles called, by the way,” Dawn says, heading for the kitchen for her usual after-school snack, Buffy in her wake.

“Uh—what?  When?”

Dawn shrugs.  “I wasn’t paying much attention.”

“Dawn.”

“C’mon, Buffy,” Dawn mutters, yanking a box of cereal from the cupboard.  “Giles deserves to be iced out a little.  He was a poop.”

“Maybe,” says Buffy.  “But he’s a poop who’s negotiating my salary with the Watcher’s Council, so probably I should be taking his calls.  Did he leave a number?”

“I guess,” Dawn said.  “I might’ve forgotten to write it down.”

“Dawn!”

“Okay, okay, kidding,” Dawn says, retrieving a phone number from where it’s been pinned to the fridge with a magnet, in plain sight.  “Geez.”

Buffy rolls her eyes as Dawn saunters away, and punches the phone number.  It rings only once before someone picks up.

“Buffy.”

Buffy pulls the phone away from her ear, staring at it a moment before realizing: it’s entirely possible she’s the only one who has this number, if it’s Giles’s hotel room.  She presses it to her ear again.

“Giles.”

“I lost my temper last night.”

“You sure did.”

There is a silence.  Buffy knows she’s said something a little off again, but she’s less troubled about that, just now.

“It’s only… you aren’t acting like yourself, and I was… concerned.”

“I know.”

“Er.”

A blossom of warmth bursts into Buffy’s gut at this very Gilesian filler word, unbidden.

“…Which do you know?” he finishes.

“I’m not acting like myself.”  Buffy bites her lip and tugs on the phone cord a little.  “When I came back, everything was so bright and loud and present, and just… everywhere all at once?  Spike and Dawnie know to be quiet, and—and you did okay, too—but everyone else is deafening.  And I don’t have to pretend for Spike or Dawnie.”

“Pretend what, Buffy?”

“To be myself, I guess?  To be okay.  Everyone else just expects me to be okay.  And myself.”

The clock over the phone clicks loudly, repetitively, an irritating little stimulus, like an unremitting tap on the shoulder.  The refrigerator hums and screeches by turns.  The humming isn’t so bad, but the high-pitched shrieking hurts. 

And she’s saying this all wrong.

“It’s all right to be a little.  Discombobulated,” Giles murmurs.

“Good word,” Buffy says, and only realizes she’s whispered it when Giles says,

“Hmm?”

“That’s the word for it,” she says, a little louder.  “Everything out of place and three degrees off plumb.”

“Ah—hmm?  Three degrees off—?”

Buffy snorts.  “C’mon, that’s a Britishism.”

“I seem to recall there is a ‘bubble’ in there, somewhere.”

“Half a bubble,” Buffy says, “off plumb.”

“There we are.  I’m glad we’ve solved this conundrum.”

Buffy snorts again.

She remembers all over again that she really likes Giles.

“What you said to Dawn—”

“Requires its own apology.  I understand.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“I didn’t.”

Buffy turns that over in her mind, holding it up like porcelain to the light to determine its quality.  “You lied,” she pronounces.

“Possibly.  What about?”

“About the apartment in Bath.  Friends.  Nearly-a-new-friend.”

“I didn’t—”

“You omitted,” Buffy cuts in.  “You’re not all right.  You weren’t, I mean.  And you’re still not.”

Another pause.

“No,” Giles says, finally.  “No.”

“You normally wouldn’t yell at Dawn like that.”

“No.”

“I’m not excusing you.”

“You oughtn’t.”

“But I didn’t remember you mean.  I didn’t remember you cruel.”

After a beat of silence, Buffy realizes Giles has no idea what to say to this, so she presses on.

“Ergo… you’re not all right.”

“What would you like to hear?” he says, voice splintering to pieces.  “That losing you nearly killed me?  It did.”

Buffy makes a low, mournful sound.  Wordless.

“I knew you would die, Buffy.  I knew you would die before me.  I thought I was prepared.  That first year, with the Master, I thought—I thought I was inured.  I thought how I’d been prepared to let you go, that first year.  How I thought it would be more-or-less the same this time.  Only I’ve loved you a little more every year I’ve known you, and it was worse.”  He laughs a little, and Buffy thinks he might be crying.  “It was so much worse.”

Buffy realizes her free hand is moving to grip the receiver, like she can hold Giles through the phone. 

“Do you remember when you told me, that if you lost Dawn, you were done?”

Vaguely.  Like through a Vaselined lens.

“That was you for me, Buffy.  You were gone and I couldn’t.  I couldn’t, anymore.”

Buffy holds the phone and breathes: in, out.  She has to, these days.

“I did go to Bath.  I did go out with old friends.  But I was wearing this, this unbearable mask of someone for whom the world was safe and, and normal.  Someone who went for a round of drinks at the pub, and The Watcher’s Council congratulated me, you know?  They said, good on me for getting a girl to her second decade.”

Buffy frowns.

“…Buffy?”

“Yes.  I’m here.  I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“My nervous breakdown?  How kind.”

“Your grief.”

Giles clears his throat.  Buffy hears the unmistakable sound of a tissue being freed of a box very close to the phone.

“But I have to ask.  Watcher’s Council knows?”

“Oh,” Giles says.  His voice is muffled, now.  Through the tissue, she assumes.  “Er, yes.  I encountered some of them.  And.  I had planned to donate my journals, as—as you do.”

“Right, but—”

“But I told them there had been some kind of mistake.  Obviously,” Giles mutters, sniffling.  “This is part of what I mean, my dear.  You never concerned yourself with details like these, before.  You… trusted I would have taken care of it.”

“It had to be a pretty good story to fool them.”

“You’d be surprised,” Giles says.  “You’d be surprised, they—they were prepared to believe anything at all, so long as their Slayer was back.  And the Slayer line runs through Faith, now, so that’s all they are monitoring, mystically speaking.”

Buffy hears a note in Giles’s voice she doesn’t understand, a tension.

Giles offers up a pathetic attempt at a chuckle.  “Goodness.  I don’t think I knew all that was down there.”

“I don’t think grief is a one-and-done deal,” Buffy opines.  “I remember.  Mom.”

“Yes.  Yes, of course you do.”

“Spike, too.”

There is a brief pause.  “Spike?”

“He cries.  Almost every time he sees me.  He can’t stop, yet.  But he will, when he realizes I’m not going to leave, again.”

“Ah.”  Giles doesn’t say anything about Spike, or Spike’s soullessness, or that he must’ve known Buffy was coming back.  But Buffy can’t leave it there.

“Dawn isn’t the only person you should apologize to,” Buffy sallies.  Very gently.

Giles doesn’t say anything for a long moment.  Then, “may I come by, tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Buffy says, relieved.

It’s only after she’s hung up that she realizes he never said he would apologize, only that he would come.

Movie night is a rollicking success.

Buffy rents The Craft, and together she and Dawn make popcorn.  Dawn adds different spices and things to each bowl and makes Tara, Anya, and Willow guess the flavors.  Buffy sneaks a kernel from each bowl and her eyes widen.

Dawn is right: she has gotten good at this.

The first one has got brown sugar and a bunch of sweet spices.  Cinnamon, definitely, and maybe allspice or nutmeg?  That’s about as far as Buffy gets.  The second is plain salt and butter but it tastes like salt-butter-plus, so Dawn has made the flavors sharper, somehow.  The final bowl is spicy: salt, butter, and red and black pepper, and… definitely other things.  It’s not fiery but it’s enough to make Buffy grab a few more bottles of water before heading for the living room.  Willow starts off a little stiff, but halfway through the movie and she’s uncurled, leaning against Tara beside her on the couch.

Onscreen, the wise old witch murmurs, true magic is neither black, nor white—it’s both, because nature is both.  Loving and cruel, all at the same time.  The only good or bad is in the heart of the witch.  Life keeps a balance on its own.  You understand?

Willow nods virtuously at the screen.  When Tara tries to prod her she says, “hush!  I’m listening.”

“You’re not gonna be a bad witch,” Tara tells her.  “Because your heart is good.”

Willow kisses her on the nose.

Anya, naturally, cheers whenever there is Vengeance.

It turns out that it is hard to end a party when most everybody lives at your house.

Luckily, they have Anya’s exodus to mark the time.  She shakes Buffy’s hand, pats Dawn gently atop the head, and waves to the others before she departs.

And luckily again, Buffy has another timekeeping device.  Anya nearly barrels into Spike, who’s arriving just as she opens the door to go.

Spike is standing on her porch in the moonlight in his usual duster, dark jeans and boots, his hair all pale and shining, the welcome in his eyes still overlaid with a lingering disbelief.  “Slayer,” he says.  “Thought we might do the rounds.  You in?”

“Sure!”  Buffy turns back into the house to grab her half-finished water bottle.  “Everyone, I’m going Slaying!”

Willow moves to hang out at Buffy’s side, by the door.  “That’s good, getting back into the swing of things.  Hiya, Spike.”

Buffy’s gaze darts over to Willow, who looks inexplicably a little bashful.

“Hullo, Red,” Spike says, clearly taking this in as well, before redirecting his attention to Buffy.  “Shall we, pet?”

Buffy whirls and backs out of the open door, pointing to Willow.  “You’ll make sure Dawn’s asleep at normal sleeping-hours?”

“You bet,” says Willow, looking indulgent.  Then her gaze does a funny thing where it skips from Buffy, to Spike, and back.  “Oh!” she says.  “Uh.  Yeah, you, um, stay out as late as you want!  Me and Tara will be here.”

Buffy isn’t sure what this means except that it gives her more time with Spike.  She pauses on the porch.  “Thank you, Willow.  You’re a good friend.”

Willow’s lip wobbles.  “Um.  I try to be,” she says.  Then, “goodnight,” and she closes the door.

“So what was that all about?” Buffy inquires, bouncing down the porch steps to walk side-by-side down the empty blacktop with Spike.  The night is nice; the night is nicer than inside.  Buffy can hear insects, and night-birds, and the distant hum of cars.  Three neighbors’ televisions are on in hearing distance, but the walls and the gap between her and them means she can only hear one clearly, and mostly the laugh track.  It’s true that the power lines hum—did the power lines always hum?—but it’s generally quiet, and nice, and being with Spike is nice, and the air has a sweet sort of floral scent that’s not too cloying.  Spike smells like leather and cigarettes and something minty—oh, he brushed his teeth!—and even though it’s a lot, it’s actually one smell, it means Spike, so it’s not loud.

“Red?” Spike queries, half-turning back to the house as if to indicate Willow’s presence.

Buffy nods.

“She… she figured this is a date.  Buffy.”

“She did?”

“Yeah.  Think so,” Spike confirms.

She looks up.  He’s watching her warily.  His hands come up just a little—just a hair—like he thinks he might have to block a blow, maybe.

That doesn’t feel very good.

“I guess I should’ve said something,” Buffy realizes.  “You and I decided, but I didn’t—I didn’t tell anybody else.”

“Figured you wouldn’t.”

Buffy’s surprised.  She looks up to see Spike has thrust both hands into the pockets of his duster and his shoulders are hunched up and his head is hanging down.  He’s making himself smaller.

That doesn’t feel very good, either.  Buffy traces the conversation back, like a child pulling their pointer finger under a line of text they didn’t quite understand the first time.

“It’s okay that Willow knows,” she tries.

Spike looks up.  “It is.”  Like he’s double-checking.

“I mean, I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret,” Buffy clarifies, tucking one arm through his.  His hands are still thrust into his pockets, making a nice little needle for her to thread her arm through.  “I just figured the next time we were all together?  Honestly, I didn’t think about it a lot, how I’d tell them.  I figured they’d find out.”

“Um.”  Spike frowns.  “You, you weren’t worried what they’d think?”

“Not until Giles made a big deal out of… well, you existing in my vicinity,” Buffy says.  “It’s not like I don’t care about Willow, or Xander, or the others,” she adds, quickly.  She doesn’t want him to misunderstand, and that seems to be happening a lot, although around Spike and Anya and Dawn far less often than around Willow, or Xander, or Giles.  Which is weird because those are the three people who’ve known her longest.  “I just… well, we’ve been through a lot, together, I guess,” she says, brow furrowing as she reasons it out aloud.  “They might be upset, but they’ll also get over it if they do.  We’re too good friends to split over a boyfriend—no offense.”

Spike looks at her like she just invented music.  “God, I’ve been waiting on you to figure that out two years.”  He breathes out, in that way he has, a long, slow exhale.  “But I’m not just some shiftless layabout who can’t take you out for your birthday on my DoubleMeat salary, luv.  I’m, y’know.  What I am.”

“Shiftless layabout,” Buffy snorts.  “You’re so Victorian.”

He jostles her a little, playfully.  “You take that back.”

“Never!  I talked to him, you know.”

Spike looks warm, relaxed.  Happy, she realizes.  He’s happy.  And not overflowing with incredulous joy, ecstatic and terrified in equal measure that what he loves will be snatched from him again.  He’s uncomplicatedly happy, and the Rolodex flips to a new card.

Buffy is in love.

So she continues to babble a little.  “William Pratt,” she says.  “I was curious.  You were an interesting guy!  You remind me of him a lot, actually.”

She’s only brought up short when Spike stops walking.

“Back up,” says Spike, and for a split second, Buffy glances behind her, thinking they missed a baddie someplace.  When she looks up again, Spike looks—unseated.  Unsettled.  “You talked to who?”

Buffy frowns.  “Did I… was he private?  Should I not have?”

“Let’s—I think maybe I have to sit down for this one,” Spike murmurs, and leads her on to Restfield.  They sit together on one of the many stone benches scattered around the cemetery.  Spike turns half-towards her on the bench and takes up her hands.  “Who—or, or what—did you speak to?”

“William Pratt?  His, well.  Soul?  I guess, for lack of a better…”  Buffy trails off, because something bad has entered Spike’s gaze.  He’s not mad, he looks—almost frightened.  She frowns.  "I guess it wasn't— speech, either, it's just... for lack of a better word."

“And.  What did it tell you?” Spike says.  His eyes are wide.

“Um, about Byron, mostly?”

Spike ducks into a helpless laugh, covering his face with his free hand.  “Oh, Buffy.  Oh, please tell me you’re pullin’ my leg.”

Buffy shakes her head.  “The woman who walked in beauty, like the night?”

“Of cloudless climes, and starry skies,” Spike murmurs, as if on reflex.

“See?  You’re very alike,” Buffy observes.

Spike frowns.  “Are we—did you—?”  He presses his eyes closed a moment; opens them; begins again.  “No matter what Angelus harped on about, I was always under the impression I was William Pratt,” he finally says.

Buffy shakes her head, then turns it into a kind of circular motion.  “Well, yes and no.  Something of William’s left when he died.  But all his memories live on in you.  And memory is a lot.”

Spike blinks rapidly, shaking his head as if this new reality is a cloak that must settle properly over his shoulders.  “Memory is a lot,” he repeats, slow.  Not as if he’s agreeing, yet; he’s still absorbing, Buffy judges.

He looks up, then, at Buffy.  “And?  And, what did he, did he say anything?”

“You mean besides about Byron?”

Spike swallows.  “Besides that.”

Buffy thinks back.  Being elsewhere was so different from her experiences here on this plane that they’re hard to hold, as her mind locks back into familiar ways of thinking.  But she remembers sensing something that reminded her of Spike, and following it.  William was so like Spike that at first she thought he was Spike, and he’d had a job convincing her he wasn’t.  And that felt strange, because now she was on this plane, she could see someone thinking they were nothing alike; but all that difference was sitting on the surface, and their commonalities ran deep.  William Pratt had been a rebel, devoting himself to unmanly pursuits like poetry, doting on his sick mother, and pursuing someone out of his social sphere.  And Spike was a rebel among vampires, doting on Dawn and devoting himself to pursuing the Slayer.  Refusing to give up on love.

“Buffy?”

“It’s getting hard to recall,” Buffy says.  “Mm.  I got the impression he was… impressed by you?  He said he liked the turn your story’s taken—what a funny thing from a writer, I thought at the time.  Like he thought you were a character in one of his books!”

Spike’s eyebrows do a thing: Buffy registers surprise, consternation, amusement, one after the other.  Spike’s eyebrows are acrobatic, with the power to demonstrate three emotions in the time it takes most people to have one, single thought.  “Well,” he says, and Buffy sort of watches him pack this knowledge away to examine at a later date or possibly never, “helluva thing.”

Buffy nods and rises; together they walk through the fragrant night air.  To the previous milieu she can now add the fresh scent of overturned earth, mineraly and familiar and good.  Vampires don’t smell like rot; bacteria and stuff can’t grow in them, for mystical reasons, though she sometimes swear they smell gross anyway, for the comedic value.  New ones sometimes smell chemical, like formaldehyde, before whatever animates them works it out of their systems.  Buffy had to dissect a pig in her first year of undergraduate biology, and the smell was instantly familiar.

“Did they use formaldehyde in Victorian times?” she wonders.

Spike doesn’t seem to consider this an unusual thing to ask.  “They put it in the bloody milk,” he mutters, which is equally unexpected.

“Um.  What?”

“Yeah.  It’d keep stuff from goin’ off an’ it was cheap, so they’d put it in food, in small amounts.  But it’s a poison, y’know.  Kids in London, droppin’ like flies.”

Buffy felt her jaw drop.  “No way.”

“It’s why you lot have the bloody FDA.”

“What.”

That passes the time in a mostly empty graveyard.  Buffy finds and disposes of a few of the larger pieces of garbage left by the Hellions; she isn’t above a little litter removal on a slow night.  And then the earth stirs over a fresh grave.

“You ever consider,” Buffy says, waiting, “how many fledges I slay in a night?  On average, I mean.”

Spike raises a brow.

“Like…  Sunnydale’s a city, but it’s a small one.  If people die at a rate of…”  Buffy tilts her head to one side, considering.  “…And only a small percentage of them are vampire deaths and, I mean, it’s not like just a bite will turn a person, soooo…”  She frowns again.  “Do vampires ever reconstitute?  I’d never considered that.”

“Some of ‘em do,” Spike agrees.  “Seen ‘em at it.  Pretty powerful ones though, usually, not fledges.”

“Then, it just seems.  Improbable.  Statistically speaking.”

Buffy gazes down at the dirt, which is only just now disgorging one, pale arm.  And then it’s suddenly not a fun and quippy time anymore.  Buffy is seeing the inside of her own coffin, remembering how close it was, how terrifying to beat her wings against the sides, new appendages she didn’t understand, arms pounding above her, trying to call for help but something wasn’t clicking, like one of those dreams where you’re screaming at the top of your lungs but nothing is coming out. 

The real world snaps back into being before her eyes, and Buffy sees some of her own panic in the grasping limb, an eloquent desperation in its jerky, panicked reach.  And then she’s grabbing for the questing hand, clasping it by the forearm, and using Slayer strength to pull up firmly but gently; she doesn’t want skin to be caught on fragmented coffin lids or stray gravel.

She finishes pulling the creature from the earth; for a moment, the vampire stays on hands and knees.  It coughs a little, pitifully.

“Here,” Buffy says, offering her water bottle.  “Rinse.”

“Uh, Buffy,” says Spike.

Buffy looks up and the expression on Spike’s face says this isn’t normal.

Buffy realizes she doesn’t care, just when the vampire accepts the bottle of water and swishes a few times, spitting and hacking.

“Hey, thanks,” it says.

Buffy nods.  “It’s gross, right?  All that dirt.”  She remembers Spike’s words.  “Had to do it, myself.”

The vampire looks up, in game face.  But its eyes are wide, and teary from hacking up a lung, so it’s not as scary as she thinks whatever designed vampires meant it to be.  “Y-you did?  What happened to you?  Uh.  What happened to me?”

Spike, bless him, rolls with it.  “Do you remember dyin’ at all, mate?”

The vampire’s gaze goes faraway.  “Uh?  Oh.”  Distress flares across its features.  “Oh, no.  But!  I feel fine, now!  It must be fine!  In fact, I feel.  Gosh, starving… but really okay!”

“Oh.  Right,” Buffy says.  “See, here’s the thing…”

The vampire lunges for her; but it’s a fledge.  Buffy easily holds it back, then flips it to pin it to the earth, where it snarls and bites at the air.  When Spike offers her an extra stake (like she lost hers!) she shakes her head.  Instead, she lets the fledge exhaust itself.

It doesn’t take long.  The slight vampire goes limp after just a few minutes of trying and failing to bite her.

Buffy raises an eyebrow like she does at Dawn when Dawn says she’s totally old enough to watch an R-rated movie with her friends.  “Are you done?”

Something must’ve been in that instinct, because when the vampire beneath her shakes off its game-face, it looks about Dawn’s age.   

“Shit,” Spike breathes over her shoulder.

“W-what?”  The kid looks at Buffy wide-eyed.  “What did I do?  Did I just—did I attack you?  Oh, Jesus Christ—ow!”

“There’s a whole Christian symbology thing,” Spike tells the kid.  “Try not to take the Lord’s name, etcetera.”

Buffy looks up at him, surprised.  “I never knew that.  I’ve never heard a vampire…”

“Long ago, some very powerful Christian witch—probably called her a saint, or summat—cursed the words, and some of the symbols,” Spike explains, half to her, half to the child-vampire.

Buffy looks down at the kid.  She moves off of it and stands, offering her hand.

The kid, looking wary, allows Buffy to pull it up to its feet.

“C’mon,” Buffy says.  “Spike, let’s show—”

“Sarah.”

“—Sarah where the local butcher shop is.”

Spike stares at her.  There’s something in his eye half-wary, half-awed.  “Buffy.  Are you sure?”

“Well.  Yeah,” Buffy says, jerking her chin to the baby-vamp, who’s still looking puzzled and troubled and not a little freaked out.

And Spike is still as weird a vampire as she is a human, because he glances at the kid, and back to Buffy again, and shoots her a crooked smile.  “Okay.”

Chapter Text

Buffy has rescued a small vampire, instead of staking it.  Like scooping up a baby bird fallen from the nest.

The kid is only half-aware, half-conscious of her surroundings, still basically feral, and Buffy thinks she’s gonna take her for a walk through Sunnydale proper.  Something in Spike quails.

“Hey, Slayer?  Buffy?”

Buffy turns.  She’s still got a hold of the kid’s upper arm—wisely, Spike thinks—so the kid turns, too.

“Vamp’s covered in dirt, pigeon,” he points out helpfully.  “And hasn’t got very good control.”

Kid can shake off game face for minutes at a time, but lapses whenever she catches an interesting smell or has a violent thought or whatever.

Buffy gives a tiny, determined nod.  “Grab hold of her for a sec?”

Spike moves to grab her like a prisoner, but Buffy’s firm but solicitous hold and the kid’s too-young face give him pause.  Instead, he draws the kid away by her shoulder and the opposite hand clasped in his.  Something squirms in his gut at the bloodied tips of her fingers, the broken nails.  An echo of an echo of an echo.

“You’re like me,” she says.

Meanwhile, Buffy is shrugging out of her off-white hoodie.  She’s wearing a pristine white tee shirt beneath.

“Kind of,” Spike agrees.  He finds himself dusting gravedirt from the kid’s short hair, ruffling it, then dusting off the tops of her shoulders.

“Here you go,” Buffy says, and maneuvers the hoodie over the kid’s head; the kid goes automatically, leaning so that her head can pop out, wriggling her arms into the arm holes.  Like it’s not so long ago someone had to do this for her.  Buffy takes up Spike’s position in front of Sarah and pulls the hood up.  “Perfect.  Now, just duck your head if you’re feeling a little weird.”

“Thank you.  It’s warm.  It smells like you,” the fledge says.

“Let’s go get you some dinner,” Buffy replies when the vamp’s face shifts again.

The kid nods inside Buffy’s hoodie and loops its arm through hers, uncomplaining.

The all-night butcher lets them in.  There’s another clearly-a-vampire ahead of them in line.  It purchases its blood and then sees Buffy.  Its gaze flares.

But Buffy’s uncharacteristic mercy holds.  “You’re doing the right thing,” she says.  “You don’t need to be afraid.”

The vampire’s lips part in surprise.  He gives her half a nod, half an obeisance, and exchanges a very complicated look with Spike.  Spike doesn’t recognize him, but he recognizes the look: a tilt to the head, a nod, a lean to Buffy and back to him, before he sweeps past them.  Over almost before Spike can register the implications: a kind of like-minded acknowledgement.

He finds himself half-turning back as Buffy steps up to the counter; who the hell was that?  How did he understand?  Who is he watching over? 

“Spike, how much did you need when you were new?” Buffy inquires, attentive and curious.  Her gaze is still wide and true, not a spark of judgement.  It doesn’t feel like it can be real.

Three dead chums’ worth, Spike doesn’t say.  “Er.”

“Here,” the butcher says.  “Start her off with this.”  He passes off about two liters in a plastic container with a snap lid.

Buffy digs in her pocket and pays the man, and they head back into the area behind the shop.  Buffy lowers the kid to sit on a crate and pops the lid.  “Here ya go.  Try to take tiny sips, okay?  Otherwise, that hoodie’s a goner.”

Sarah conscientiously moves the hood back, and then takes a tentative sip, then another, and another.  Then she presses the container back into Buffy’s grip, buries her head in her hands, and starts to sob.

Spike is at a loss.  Becoming a vampire was a transcendent experience for him; but then, he had Dru.  At least at first, he thought he had the divine answer to his mother’s troubles.  This poor pidge had been left in a box, her maker staked by him or one of the Scoobies, or maybe it was just someone who didn’t give a flip, someone who got a kick out of turning little girls.  She must be so lost.  How would she look after herself?  How the hell could she find a place to hole up that she could keep, looking perpetually fifteenish?  Christ, it might’ve been a mercy to stake her.

But Buffy’s empathy seems up to the task of talking the little one down.  “There, I know,” Buffy murmurs, petting the kid’s hair.  “C’mon, drink another sip or two; you’ll feel better.”

“But it’s blood!  It’s blood,” Sarah moans.  “It’s disgusting, I’m disgusting!”

“No you’re not,” Buffy says, fiercely.  “It’s okay.”  She looks up at Spike.  “Spike’s been alive a hundred years, and he—he drinks blood from the butcher shop, like you do.”  She looks at him significantly, intently, and Spike recognizes his cue.

“Er.  Yeah, that’s right,” Spike says, taking a step closer, too.  “I don’t kill for my meals.  An’ you saw that one ahead of us,” he adds in sudden inspiration.  “There are a lot of vamps like you an’ me.”

Her gaze clears.  Her eyes are hazel-ish, like Buffy’s.  Her hair is dark brown.  She looks like she could be a Summers, with Dawn’s hair and Buffy’s eyes.  “There are?”

“Oh, yeah,” Spike lies.  Truth be told, there have been a few.  But most of ‘em are older, with hard-won experience like that Knight Templar type in front of them in line, or cursed one way or another, like him or Angel.  He’s never seen a vamp who never started drinking human blood, like this one, save one.  A fledge usually kills the first person it sees, like this one tried to; it was just her good luck that it was Buffy, who could pin her in place with ease.  “It’s not the norm, pidgeon,” he figures he should say, just in case she tries to go up to some other vamps, all friendly-like, “but we’re around.”

Something steady enters her gaze.  “Okay.”  She turns to Buffy.  “Could I have a little more?”

Buffy hands her back the blood.  Over the next twenty minutes, she drinks her blood, slow, like Buffy suggested.  They learn she is Sarah Miller, age sixteen—or nearly, she would have been sixteen next week.  (Now she will always be almost sixteen; Spike holds that thought to himself.)  She doesn’t attend Sunnydale High; she was here because her local theater wasn’t showing Riding in Cars with Boys.  She remembers hearing someone in trouble in the alley that ran between theater and the Espresso Pump and running to help, and then a tall man and a lot of pain.  She says her neck still hurts.  She has a younger brother Ryan (had, Spike immediately corrects), and a pet kitten named Void, who was an early birthday present.  Her dad left ages back, so it’s just the three of them: Ryan, her, and her mom.

Christ.  If there was a chit better designed to pull on his and Buffy’s heartstrings, Spike couldn’t have invented her himself.  He even toys with the idea that she’s a trap of some kind, but there isn’t any reason someone would have thought Buffy wouldn’t stake a vamp, any vamp, on sight.  He’s still not sure why she didn’t.

Buffy is listening to all of this with an expression of pure empathy.  Now and then she makes some kind of understanding sound, or a little noise of pain at the worst bits.  She may be awkward with her friends, but she does still seem to know what to do for something small and suffering.  She always did have that way about her for folks in trouble.  Spike just never dreamed it could extend to adolescent vampires.

Sarah finishes the last sip of blood and taps the base.

“Still hungry?” Buffy queries.

Spike could answer that.  Chit has been human-faced for twenty minutes straight, now.  Sure enough, Sarah considers, then shakes her head.

“I’m good.  My head is all clear, now.”

“Good!  That’s good.  How’re you feeling, otherwise?”

Sarah presses her lips together.  “Mm.  Really, really strong.  Am I, like, a superhero, now?”

Oof.  Dealing with teen impulsivity on top of a fresh case of vampirism… whoever ends up looking after the chit is gonna have their bloody work cut out for them.

Buffy looks up at Spike.  “Hey, can you maybe look after Sarah for a bit, while I go back to the house and prep the others to meet her?”  She leans closer.  “I don’t want them freaking out in front of her.”

Sarah straightens from her perch on the wooden crate.  “I could hear that.  Cool!”  She frowns.  “Plus, I totally don’t need looking after, I feel like I could punch through concrete!”

Spike turns to her.  “Now, I know you’re strong, pidgeon, but there are things that go bump in the night that are still stronger.  And a stake to the heart could end you right quick, so don’t go getting any ideas that you’re immortal and invulnerable an’ such.  That’s how a fledge meets her end.”

Sarah pouts, but then nods.  “Yeah, okay.  Hey, you sure I can’t just go home?  What day is it?”

Buffy turns to Spike.  “I’m gonna go on ahead of you.  Just… talk to her.  Okay?”

Spike nods, and Buffy heads off.

Sarah’s shoulders squeeze in as she clasps her hands in front of her.  Buffy’s small, but Sarah’s short: Buffy’s hoodie still looks big on her, makes her look very young.  “Maybe I could just explain things to my parents…”

“Maybe,” Spike agrees.  He’s thinking of Sunnydale and how Dawn had responded to Buffy’s return.  Maybe these folks were Sunnydale denizens, accustomed to the miraculous and the absurd.  Maybe they’d adjust, get their girl night classes or whatever, keep celebrating her birthdays, give her some kind of semblance of normal. 

Maybe one day her temper’d snap and she’d come to and they’d all be dead.  You never knew.

She looks small an’ helpless, now, but maybe she’s only playing small an’ helpless, ‘cause she already knows Buffy’s stronger than her, and if she has the sense of such things vamps often do, she can feel he’s stronger, too.  It just goes to show how much time Spike’s been sticking with humans this summer, that this is the first time that's even occurred.

“Even if they don’t want me at home, anymore, I need to get Void,” Sarah’s saying.  “They only just adopted her.  I wanted a kitten forever, and mom made me swear up and down I’d be the one to look after her.  If I’m not around, they’ll probably just send her back.”

Spike nods.  Fledges sometimes get focused, even obsessed, with one aspect of their prior existence, often something they were centered on when they died. 

“Yeah, I can’t leave Void with them,” Sarah repeats, looking more determined, now.  She looks up.  “Can you help me get her?”

“Maybe tomorrow, pidge.  The story about being invited?  Not just a story,” Spike says.  “An’ it’s gettin’ late, so knocking on the door right now might not be a good idea...”

She looks lost.  “But I live there?”

“No.  You don’t.”

She frowns, confused for a split second before she absorbs this.  “Right.  I don’t.  I don’t live anywhere.  I’m not alive.”  She holds her hands up and turns them over, like she expects death to be written in her skin somewhere, or maybe like she’s observing that she can still move and think and see without being a living thing.

“You wanna hang out with me a bit?” Spike asks.  “We could play cards or summat.”

She stands.  “Yeah, this place is dead,” she says, trying for a joke, and Spike ruffles her hair.

It doesn’t feel strange at all, having a sixteen-year-old shadow.

Well, it shouldn’t, really.

Spike keeps up an easy patter with the girl.  He’s proud to see that she’s beginning to relax.  She looks more like a normal teen now that her face has stopped shifting every few minutes, and she’s wearing Buffy’s clean top, even if her black loose dress is still pretty gross underneath.  As she relaxes, she stops giving the impression of a slinking animal that might strike if cornered: less frightened, and less dangerous.  They talk about her classes: she’s been shocked to like math this year—geometry—even though algebra was like pulling teeth.  She was a runner for track and field at school—she’s already using past tense, Spike notes—and had two, good girlfriends.  Her face falls a little when she talks about them, but she perks up when he changes the subject to vampire senses.

They’re nearly at Restfield when Spike catches the sounds of someone moving around, and tosses his arm out in front of her.  Then, the wind shifts, and—

“Harris?”

Spike presses forward to find Xander clearly on his way to see Spike, hand raised to knock on the crypt door.

“The bloody hell you doin’ out so late?” Spike demands.  “Lots of nasties about.”

“Oh, please.  There’s basically nothing around since the Hellions,” Xander returns.  Then he peers over Spike’s shoulder.  “Oh, hello…oly shit,” he says, and takes a step back.

Spike darts a quick glance back at the kid, but she’s still human-faced.  Despite that, Harris seems to know she’s a vampire and be every bit as wary of her as if she were an adult, which—fair.  She is almost as big as a grown vampire, and likely nearly that dangerous. 

“Um.  Hi,” Sarah says.  Then, another “um?” as if she’s deduced precisely what Spike has, and isn’t sure what to do about it.

“Uh, hello!” Xander squeaks.  And then there’s a beat where Spike can see the expressions racing across his face before he says, slowly, “I’m Xander.”

“I’m Sarah,” she replies, relaxing just a hair.  “You’re friends with Spike?”

Spike shoots Xander a warning, but Harris doesn’t seem to need it. 

“Oh, me and Spike go way back,” he replies, neatly evading the question.

Sarah doesn’t notice.  “Oh!  Cool.  Spike and Buffy have been helping me out.  Do you know about…?”

Xander uncurls too.  “Yeah!  Me and mortal danger go way back, too.  Even longer than me and Spike!”

Sarah giggles at that.  “You’re funny!” she observes.

“A man does his best,” Xander solemnly replies.  “Hey, Spike.  Could I talk to you a sec?”

“Yeah, sure, mate.  Let me just get the lady settled.  C’mon in.”  He opens the crypt door and the pair follow him inside, Sarah right behind him, and Xander at the rear.  Spike goes around lighting candles for the human’s sake, even though Sarah squints a bit against the glow.

“Oh, it’s, um.”  Sarah seems surprised to see the stuffed chair, the television set, the candles.

“It’s gettin’ there,” Spike replies.  “Just started getting things together in here, when… well, when…”

“Our friend came back after a long time away,” Xander fills in.  “It’s been busy.”

Sarah blinks.  “Oh, Buffy?  She told me what happened.  She came back, too…”

“A lot o’ that going around,” Spike murmurs, raking his hands back through his hair.  “You want some telly, then?  I don’t have cable but I got the basic channels.”

She considers.  “Yeah, maybe something mindless is good.”

Spike frowns at her and uses the excuse of dusting her off a bit more to offer the comfort of touch.  She leans into it a little, then goes to futz with his ancient television set.

Xander and Spike step back outside.

“Okay, what the hell,” Xander says, just in case his expression wasn’t eloquent enough.  For the first time, Spike notices that Xander already looks disheveled, hair ruffled and open button-down a bit askew.

“Dunno what you wanna hear,” Spike mutters, grasping about in his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter.

“For starters, why you have a tiny—vampire—girl in your house!”

“It’s technically a public cemetery.  Anyone’s allowed to be here,” Spike says reasonably around his cig as he cups his palm to light it.

Xander merely waves his arms, eyes wide.

“Hell.  Fine, Harris,” he says, pulling a lungful of nicotine.  “Buffy plucked her out of the ground, fed her up an’ wants to take her home.”  He thinks of Void.  “Like a bloody stray kitten.”  Harris’s jaw-drop around fed her up makes him qualify.  “Store-bought, Harris, she didn’t go ahead and offer herself, nor any delicious townies.”  In the spirit of their new semi-truce, Spike relents.  “Kid hasn’t killed anybody.  She’s fresh as a new blade of grass.  Buffy bought her some blood to drink an’ it settled her right down.  You saw.”

Xander shifts on his feet, opens his mouth a few times, closes it, tries again.

That means he’s still trying.  Trying to find something to say that isn’t pure cursing, or suggesting they find a stake.  So Spike holds his peace ‘til Harris finds his feet.

“Buffy never would’ve done that, before.”

Oh.  More dangerous than cursing or suggesting they find a stake.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Harris demands.  “This isn’t like her, you know it’s not.  She’s—”

“What?  Kinder?” Spike volleys back.  “You know that happens, sometimes.  People go through something and they’re a little wiser, a little softer, out the other side.  Nothin’ unusual about it!”

Xander opens his mouth and closes it again.  He sucks in a breath through his teeth, instead.  Self-control wins this round too, it seems.  “Right, okay.  Um.  So, do you remember back from before you were—from when you were human?”

This is so far from what Spike had thought Xander would say—for so many reasons— that he doesn’t reply for a long moment, sucking on his cigarette.  Harris doesn’t like acknowledging that vampires were ever human, and if he does, he’s fondest of the “human dies, vampire replaces them” yarn.  Which means Xander is relinquishing one of his most important coping mechanisms to tell Spike something, which means it probably merits a listen.

“Um.  Yeah.  ‘Course I do.”

“Really?  Over a hundred years ago.  You remember being Turned?”

Spike frowns.  The fuck.  Okay, he’ll play.  “Yes.  One of the most important events of my existence… I’m unlikely to forget it, in all its sordid detail.”

“Okay,” Xander says, nodding, satisfied.  “So you remember when you first saw Drusilla.”

The fuck is this going?  “Yeah, of course.”

“And how you felt when you saw her.”

Spike blinks.  He’s suddenly a raw young man again.  There’s a woman in an alley, speaking in this terrible singsong.  Awesome in her power, thrilling, thralling—but at the same time, he knows, knows, that there is something wrong with her.  Not that she’s mad, or not just that; rather, there is something dark and festering at the core of her, some black malevolence she emits like radioactivity.  He’s simultaneously compelled and utterly appalled.

He comes back to himself to find that Xander is staring at him expectantly.

“Humans feel like that,” Spike hears himself say, slowly, “when they look at a vampire?”

Xander offers him a kind of sideways smile.  “I mean, it depends.  On the human and on the vampire.  Uh, obviously, because not everybody even seems to know what they’re looking at.  I guess some people don’t sense anything at all, some people get, like, an out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye sort of weirdness.  And for some people, it’s full-on Ctuthlu vibes.”

A sick uneasiness drops into Spike’s stomach.  Because it’s clear Harris belongs to that last category if he can clock a fledge a few hours old.

So Spike makes Harris feel like there’s some creeping malevolence in the air?

Xander shrugs uncomfortably.   “So that little girl isn’t ever gonna feel like she’s a kid, to me.  And I’m not sure why suddenly Buffy is more relaxed around you, or why that vampire looks and feels like a little girl to her, but I think they’re related.”  Xander rolls his eyes.  He’s smiling again, a little.  “If I had to guess, I’d say Buffy isn’t exactly human anymore.”

Spike is still expecting someone to come and snatch Buffy away, carry her back to heaven, where she belongs.  And he believes she deserves her Just Reward, it’s just he’s not sure what would happen to him if she died, again.  He shakes himself free of these unhappy thoughts.  Spike isn’t human, and Harris still isn’t reaching for a stake, is he?  For him or the new chit.  This is an FYI, a heads up, for some reason.  “Uh, why’d you come by?”

“Just to let you know that Giles is coming back to talk to Buffy tomorrow.  Buffy told Will, who told me.  I just—I thought you should be there.” 

“Watch it, Harris.  Any more of this and I’m gonna starting thinkin’ we’re in this together.”

“Perish the thought,” the boy said.  “Anyway, what’s gonna happen to the kid?”

Spike opens his mouth, then pauses.  It’s only now Harris is standing here that he realizes Buffy’s solution won’t work.  Is, on the surface of it, mad.  No matter how sweet Sarah seems right now—no matter how lost and friendless she is—how could Buffy even consider inviting her into the house where Willow and Tara live?  Not to mention Dawnie.

How could Buffy think that was a good solution?

Xander tilts his head, as if trying to meet his eyes.  “…Spike?”

“She’ll stay with me,” Spike blurts.  “I was doin’ up the downstairs anyway.  Isn’t, well, the right environment for a girl her age, but don’t know who the hell else could take her.”

There: good, he’s covered for Buffy.

With her friends.

When he looks up, Xander’s frowning at him lightly.  He licks his lips, looks down, then shifts on his feet before lifting his gaze to Spike’s again.  “Good.  That’s… good,” he says.  “So you’ll keep an eye on her.”

Spike shrugs.

“Not a lot of people would take in a kid like this, much less a kid with problems,” Xander says evenly, and Spike thinks maybe the Sunnydale poison has gotten into Harris’s veins after all, because he isn’t joking and he doesn’t even pause at calling vampirism a problem, like Sarah was caught spraypainting a wall at school or smoking dope in the park at night, instead of, well, dead. 

“If past-Xander could see you, now,” Spike deadpans.

Xander pulls a considering-face.  “Yeah, well, he isn’t here.  Lucky you.”

“Lucky, yeah,” Spike says.  “Now c’mon.  Let me grab Sarah an’ we’ll walk you back.  Enough dead folk around this place—don't you think?”

Chapter Text

Spike wakes up alive and undusted, a deep and unexpected relief—Spike hadn’t known he was worried ‘til he didn’t have to be, anymore.  He rolls off the sarcophagus lid and descends the ladder to the lower level of the crypt to find Sarah sprawled across his bed, snoring and early-evening disheveled, hair tousled and oversized tee tangled so badly it was probably choking her from being twisted in her sleep.  She had thoughtfully removed Buffy’s hoodie and draped it at the foot of the bed, for lack of a better spot.

“Pidge,” he says, and Sarah awakens with a start, scrambling back against the headboard.  She’s vamped somewhere between the flinch and the scramble.  Spike finds himself reaching both hands out, palms open.  “Here, now.  It’s only ol’ Spike.  Remember?  You’re all right.”

Sarah breathes once, twice.  A habit leftover from living.

Spike wonders if she’ll keep it.

Wide, hazel eyes make their reappearance as she goes human-faced again.  Her fingers unclench from the bedclothes, slowly: a conscious process.  “Spike,” she says, as if to remind herself.  She looks around herself and is suddenly clutching the covers even closer, up to her chin.

Spike feels the Victorian urge to spin on his heel and retreat up the ladder as fast as his feet can carry him, but he makes himself stay, pins her with his most intent gaze.  “No need for all that.”

Sarah’s hands lower.  “Then what do you want?  What am I here, for?”

Spike realizes he has no idea.  “Just felt like the right thing to do.”

She blinks.  “Oh.”  She blinks again, harder, like she’s trying to translate a foreign language.  She visibly gives up.  “Okay.”

Spike walks to a chest of drawers and draws out his tightest pair of jeans, tossing them at her.  “Here,” he says.  “Come up when you’re decent.”

A few minutes later she emerges in the same old tee plus his jeans.  She looks bloody adorable, since both are still too big.  She’s holding Buffy’s hoodie, folded neater than Spike was aware hoodies could be folded, just a perfect little square.

“All right, there, pidge?”

“Yeah, thanks.  Hungry again.  Very,” she says, and Spike rises to his feet to make them some brekkie.  He heats up his blood and some for the fledge, too.  She sips on it sitting on the floor next to the television, tucked in between it and one of Spike’s few shelves, like a cat settling into the smallest box it can fit.  Spike sits in the chair, figuring she’s still a little twitchy, can use the room.

They’re just finishing up their respective cups and rinsing them from the water lines downstairs when they both hear someone knocking.

“Stay here,” Spike commands, and she nods once, sharp.  He climbs up.

Bloody hell.

“Yo,” Xander says.  He looks more put together, more something.  There’s a confidence in the set of his shoulders, the lines of his face.  “Hey, were you serious about the kid?”

Spike frowns.  “I mean.  I haven’t laid it all out with her, yet, but yeah.”

“Maybe now’s the time.”

Spike eases back, letting Harris past him.

“Your hair,” Xander says, and Spike realizes he hasn’t put any gel in it, yet.

“Yeah, what about it?”

Xander examines his face, finds his irritation, and says, “…nothing.  Hey, Sarah!” he calls.

The kid pokes her head up out of the aperture to the lower level.  “Xander!”

Spike’s gaze flickers over to Harris, whose expression stays friendly, but there’s a tense line running between his shoulders, and he keeps clenching and unclenching his fists.  Spike turns to the kid.  “Hey, so,” he begins.  “Er.  I was wonderin’.  Uh, I’ve been fixin’ up the place, and.  Seeing as you don’t have—”

Xander interrupts.  “How’d you like to stay with Spike?”

She deflates, even though she’s still smiling.  “I thought Buffy was gonna let me stay with her?”

Xander shakes his head.  “Do you know about invites?”

“I can’t come in a house unless I’m invited.”

“Right, which makes Buffy’s house a safe place.  For a lot of people.”

Sarah considers this, biting her lower lip.  “But Spike can come in?  He told me he was at Buffy’s house last night.”

Xander twitches.  “Yeah.  Uh, but that’s because there’s an extra layer of safety with Spike.  He can’t hurt anybody.”

“Oh.”  Another frown.  “Can’t we do that to me, whatever it is?”

Spike chokes.

“No,” Xander says, slowly.  “That’s a really good thought, but.  What happened to Spike hurts him.  We wouldn’t want that to happen to you.”

Spike turns to stare.  Harris is really good at this, somehow, talking to kids.  He guesses he vaguely remembers that from the parts of Dawn’s childhood that didn’t actually happen, but it was always in the periphery, before.

“So Spike has to watch me.  Or Buffy.  Buffy’s really strong.”

Xander nods.

“But you’re ordinary.”

“Yup!” Xander enthuses.  “That’s me!  Utterly run-of-the-mill.”

She eyes him.  “But you’re here.  With two vampires.”

Xander swallows.  “Well aware.”

Sarah frowns, examining him.  “You’re willing to risk yourself.  But not anybody else.”  She takes one of those steadying breaths.  “Okay.  I can.  Stay here, I guess.  In.  In this crypt.”

“Good!” Xander says.  “Was hoping you’d say that.  Come with me.”

Spike and Sarah exchange a look and follow Harris out of the crypt, out of Restfield and to the street, where his construction van is parked illegally.  He opens the back and gestures to the open back.

There’s furniture inside.

A bedframe, stacked up against the side.  A bedside table.  Two little shelves.  A stuffed chair.  Spike turns to look at him.

“Sometimes people ask us to haul stuff away,” Xander explains.  “We usually sell it off, real cheap, but I can sometimes get it for free if I just ask, because hauling it and storing it all ‘til it sells is a pain.  So, um, take whatever,” he says, and Sarah is already clambering in to look at all of it.  “You said you were fixing it up downstairs.  Do you have running water?  Do you need, like, a sink or anything?”

Spike shakes himself a little.  “Uh.  Yes on the sink, that’d be… helpful.  Pidge, why don’t you pick something and bring it in?”

She grabs the chair.  “Oh!  I can lift it all by myself!”

“Careful.  It’s still awkward,” Spike says, and she shifts it in her arms a little until it’s balanced better.  Spike grabs the long sides of the bedframe, and Harris takes the short.  Sarah drops the chair in the upstairs area by the television set, and Spike eases the bedframe to the bottom level, then accepts when Harris passes his sides of the frame down.  Then both of them follow him to the bottom level.

“So this is a little complicated,” Harris says, turning in place.  “But not that bad.  See, if we were to frame a wall out here, and a door here,” he says, sweeping with his hands, “you could make two rooms that both had access to the bathroom.  You’d still have to pass through them both to get back upstairs, but it should be pretty cheap to get the wall up in this small a space. And if that’s too awkward, we could frame this area here into a short hallway with the bath on one side and the bedrooms on the other, leading to the ladder up. We’re doing two new bathrooms this week, so if either sink still works I’ll set it aside for you if you want.”  He eyes Spike.  “I mean, as a temporary measure, while you save up.  You’ll probably need a real basement apartment.  And a job.”

Spike blinks.  “Uh, that’s a boatload of manly responsibility—”

“Right,” Harris crows, clapping him on the shoulder.  “Which you’ve chosen to take on.”

Spike shakes himself.  He looks over at Sarah.  She doesn’t seem to know what to do with her face, whether she should be appealing or frowning or smiling.  So she mostly looks at her feet.

“Yeah.  What the hell.  Yes, I have,” Spike says.  He thinks about looking after his mother.  He thinks about how he’d started to look after Dawn, the way the big-brotherly mantle had felt natural over his shoulders, like he wasn’t trying at all.  Made him feel good, even, more focused than he’d been since Dru.

He thinks he might be good at looking after people. 

He isn’t sure why Harris is helping.  It’s one thing not to stake the kid on sight; working to improve her unliving situation is something else entirely.  While Sarah fusses with the position of the new furniture upstairs, adding a side table to the new stuffed chair, and a lamp—Spike frowns at Harris until he shuffles in place a little.

“So I talked to Anya last night,” he says.

Spike only folds his arms.

Harris tilts his head as if to ensure that Sarah is otherwise occupied.  She is, but possibly despite all the danger signals the fledge is apparently emitting, Harris seems to have forgotten she’s not human, or at least forgotten that vampires have very acute senses.  “She says that there are spells that prevent entities from causing harm, but it doesn’t have to hurt.  Vampires don’t seek out those kinds of spells, as a rule,” Xander fills in.  “They’re usually cast by people who used to—to love the person who—”

Spike blanches.  “Oh.”

“Yeah.”  Xander takes a breath.  “It doesn’t stop them from saying or doing terrible things; it doesn’t make them act like they did when they were human.  It just doesn’t let them hurt people.”  He makes this sort of glancing eye contact, bouncing off of Spike’s gaze.  “Like the chip.”

Spike still isn’t sure how to take Harris’s new attitude.  “Finally cued in, did you?”

“Not to give you any ideas, but why didn’t you burn us all alive?  Or something?”

Spike cocks his head at Xander.  “Why don’t you?”

Xander clicks his tongue.  “I’m a person.  With a soul.”

Spike shakes his head.  “Lot of human serial killers out there.”

“Well.  Yeah.  Uh, I guess because… I’d feel… guilty?”

“I don’t feel guilt—much.”

“Well, then, because… I want my friends around.  Uh, I like them, even though they piss me off, sometimes, I… enjoy their company…?”

Spike lifts a brow.  “Well, sure.  But you could always move to some other town, make some other friends, if you offed this set.”

This lights a fire under the boy; he bristles with offense.  “Of course I couldn’t!  Look, even if I didn’t have a soul and didn’t get super-guilty about murder, people aren’t interchangeable parts, I could never just replace Willow or Buffy…”  He trails off.  He’s staring, a little.

Spike feels himself soften, feels his lip curl.

“Oh,” the boy says.  “Um.  You.  Like us?”

“I’m used to you.  Like a chronic infection,” Spike mutters, but he keeps smiling, and Harris manages not to take offense, for once.  “There’s a difference.”

Harris shifts from foot to foot, then looks up.  “Is there?”

Spike feels his smile grow, turn real.  “Not really.”  He shoves at Harris, who takes a step back.  “Now I’ve declared my feelings, hearts an’ roses and all.  Cough it up, now, pay me in kind.”

Xander looks around like he thinks he’s on candid camera or summat.  It’s weirdly cute, like someone might catch him being sappy.  “I wanna kill you about half as often as I used to,” he admits, and when Spike merely beckons—not enough, give me more—he relents with a sigh.  “I guess I’m… used to you, too, Spike.”

“Gosh,” Spike says, really enjoying himself, now.  “Really?  Drop that Anya bird and let’s get hitched!”

This coaxes a genuine laugh out of Harris.  “Hey, I think Buffy still has first dibs,” he says, and then hitches in this little gasp, like he’s crossed some electrified tripwire in the conversation.

“I haven’t asked her to marry me since she got back,” Spike says.

Harris stares.  “I meant the Will-Be-Done thing.  Jesus.”

“Oh,” says Spike, just as Harris says,

“Wait—are you and Buffy—now?”

“Uh,” says Spike.  “She wanted to tell you first.”

Xander swallows.  He examines the room like he’s searching for something, and suddenly Spike realizes that he hasn’t been looking around for Sarah, who’s peaceably flipping through one of Spike’s novels awhile, now, but searching for some kind of inner strength.  “Okay, listen.  We.  Didn’t tell you because we just—we didn’t, okay?”

Spike frowns.  “Harris,” he says. 

“See, it’s Buffy,” he goes on.  “She’s not herself.  You know she’s not herself, you told me.”

Spike’s world feels like it’s sinking, suddenly.  Like the crypt is dropping to the center of the earth, accelerating as it goes.

“So, Giles said he had this spell to—”

The front of Harris’s button-down is suddenly fisted in Spike’s hand.  He’s yanking up hard enough to make it hard for the boy to keep his feet.  Spike doesn’t remember the intervening moment; he doesn’t remember making the decision to grab, to lift.  Sarah is suddenly up, darting to stand behind Spike, her eyes wide.

“You were,” Spike says.  He knows this.  He’s put it together instantly.  But he has to say it aloud.  “Distracting me.  By pretending to be kind.”

Xander’s face falls.  “Listen, Spike.  It’s Buffy.  You and me, we were always gonna be—be fooled, okay?  If what came back was even a little like her.”

“The spell,” Spike says.  Inside of him, a rage is kindling that is like to be an inferno; he can feel it burning inside his chest.  Every moment that passes tosses another faggot on the pile.  “What is Giles doing to her?”

“We’re only doing a spell to see if she’s herself!  If she’s really Buffy,” Xander says.

“No, you’re not.”

Spike and Xander turn.

Sarah’s eyes are still wide but her lip is curled into a sneer.  “It’s to make sure that Spike’s out of the way if she’s not.  If you decide to get rid of her.”

The world blips again and this time Spike has let go of Harris.  He has to run, he has to get to Buffy.  “Christ, I really thought—” Spike mutters, raking his hands up through his hair and gripping, tugging at the roots.  It grounds him a little.  “Pidge,” he says to Sarah, “I need you to come with me, fast as you can, now.  You’re too new, I can’t leave you alone.”  He whips to Harris.  “Unless you actually learned that little spell of Anya’s?  Was that even a thing?”

“It’s, it’s a thing,” Harris says.  He’s got one hand up to his throat, as if feeling for damage Spike left.

But there couldn’t be any to speak of, could there?

He couldn’t harm Harris.

Not directly.

“Come on, we’ll take the van,” Harris mutters.  “Faster than vampires can run, I think.”

“Thought it was your job to distract me.  Us,” Spike says, suddenly encompassing Sarah in this; chit’s in it whether she likes it or not.

“Well, obviously, I changed my mind,” Xander says.  “Or maybe lost it.”

Spike grabs for Sarah’s hand and dashes off for Harris’s car and jumps into the driver’s seat.  When Harris makes an offended sound climbing in the passenger side, Spike arches an eyebrow at him.  “Think I’d trust you not to just drive me out of town after this?”

“Yeah, right, no,” Xander agrees as Sarah clambers in the back, gripping their chair backs, one with each hand.  Spike looks back at her, waits for her nod, then throws the car into gear and rushes through Sunnydale—blowing through stop signs and red lights.  Harris says nothing at all, white-knuckling the passenger-side grab-handle, thin-lipped and big-eyed.  Sarah is light enough on her feet that her grip on the backs of their seats keep her balanced.

They arrive and Revello Drive and Spike stops the van with a screech.

Inside Spike’s head is a roar of white noise, and Sarah remembers to grab for him instead of the other way around.

“I’m gonna be in so much trouble,” Xander mutters, but leads them to the front door.

“This is Buffy’s house?” Sarah queries.

Spike jerks a nod and then they face their first, and in retrospect, obvious obstacle.

Sarah doesn’t have an invite.

Spike realizes this when they reach the door and feels ten kinds of idiot.  He can’t keep hold of the chit and enter, and he has to go inside.  Buffy is in trouble, even Harris seems to realize that.  But Sarah is new, and if he lets go of her, she could lose control, go after the Summers’ bloody next door neighbors.

Xander swallows.  He looks at the house, at Spike, at Sarah.  “I’ve got this,” he says.

Spike spares a split second to goggle.  “You bloody well do not.  I haven’t spent all summer saving your sorry hide for you to die at the hands of a vampire I left with you.”

“I’m feeling fine, if anybody cares,” Sarah says, folding her arms.

A scream shatters the air.

Buffy.

Spike’s gaze pierces Harris’s, then Sarah’s, and then he’s running for the door.

There’s some kind of mystical whatsis in the living room a, a circle.  Buffy’s inside.  Her face is streaked with tears; her wings are out and shivering, from shock or strain.  For a moment, she’s all Spike can register; she’s alive.  She’s upset, but all right.

Upset but all right means he doesn’t have to kill anybody.

A light maiming, maybe.

“Spike?”

Spike blinks and suddenly a world exists outside of the circle that holds Buffy.  It contains Willow and Tara, Anya, and Giles.  Dawn isn't around, of course.  It being after dark, he has no doubt she was shipped off to Janice's.  Willow has tears streaking her pale cheeks, too, but Rupert’s face is grim.

“What the bloody hell are you doing to her?” Spike demands, but doesn’t wait for an answer, crossing the living room floor until he nearly crashes headlong into Willow, who has put herself between them. 

Willow has her arms outflung, with her eyes squinched closed; she’s bracing for a hit, chip be damned.  Her arms are trembling, like Buffy’s wings.  (“Honey!” Tara whispers, distressed.)  He remembers, suddenly, that realization that if Buffy weren’t Buffy, it was Willow who would have to do something about it.  He sees Willow’s suffering face, and it happens without his permission: his hands unclench and his jaw loosens.  He softens.

He looks up and Buffy shakes her head shallowly.  He isn’t sure what that means beyond that she knows why he isn’t beating the hell out of Red to get to her.  He’s close enough to see some half-familiar runes inked on the carpet; that’ll never wash out. 

It feels like the decision took a long time, but it must’ve been a split second, because Giles is yanking him away from Red, like he thought Spike would really—or maybe like he just enjoys throwing Spike around a little.

Spike tilts his head back.  “All right, Harris?”

“Peachy!” sounds from outside the house.

“What—why is Xander—?” Willow mutters, quickly followed by a, “nevermind.  Uh, please don’t hit the barrier, Spike!  It doesn’t feel good if you hit the barrier and you’re not, y’know, human.”

Oh.  Spike looks up at Buffy again.  She shrugs, then slumps.

“Well bloody hell, you little idiots, of course she’s not human; she’s got wings.  Just how daft are you?”

Willow looks up at him and her face goes all soft, now, like it did back at Restfield.  She takes him by the upper arm experimentally, watching him to see if he’ll be led.  He darts a gaze back at Buffy and she gives another one of those shallow little nods.  She looks distressed, but she isn’t hurting, he reminds himself.

He allows Willow to draw him a mere two more feet away.

“It isn’t just the wings,” she says.

Spike scoffs.

“No, listen,” Willow says.  Her eyes are big.  Her face looks green.  “I fucked up,” she says on a sob, then visibly swallows it down.  “It isn’t her.”

“What part of it isn’t her?” Spike spits.  “That’s Buffy Summers!” he spat, pointing at her.

“Spike—” Giles cuts in, but this is Red’s show.  She cuts a look at Giles that shuts him up surprisingly swiftly.

“Her soul, Spike,” she says, grimly.

Spike sputters.  “What the—?  That’s absurd, she’s not a bloody vampire.”

“No, she’s… something else,” Willow allows.  She shoots a glance at Tara.

Tara moves forward.  “W-whatever dimension Buffy was in, it’s possible she was stuck, or d-didn’t want to l-leave.  We held a door open, and…”

Willow takes up her girlfriend’s narrative.  “Something… something else flew along the connection I created and it—it went into Buffy.”

“Bullshit,” Spike growls, wheeling to Anya.  “You buy this nonsense?”

“Well, Buffy used to dislike me,” Anya supplies.  “And she was never so direct, and she really doesn’t seem to understand what being a human is like.  It’s like she never was one, before.”

Spike flinches.  “No,” he says, wheeling.  “No.”  The room is sparkling at the edges of his vision.  His hands are going numb.  Buffy’s silence from behind the circle is damning.  “And, what?  You just decided to, to trap her, to imprison her on, on a suspicion?”

Giles is shaking his head, now, irritated.  “Of course not.  If I’d been here and if somehow, you had been foolish enough to try and resurrect Buffy, I would have performed these spells immediately, to ensure Buffy was who she appeared.  But I was not.  Well, we have done them, now, and Buffy’s soul is nowhere to be found.  This is Buffy’s body, but it is not Buffy.”

“But I remember,” Buffy says, suddenly.

Spike turns to her.

Her face is a study in heartbreak.  “Being Called, Lothos, the Master.”  She shudders.  “Angelus.  Dad… Mom.”

There’s a curdling in Spike’s guts.  He goes to her again, only to stop at the edge of the barrier.  There’s no way her friends could have forced her into this circle, a Slayer with wings.  She must’ve agreed to the examination.

She must’ve thought they were right.

She swallows and looks up at Spike.  Her eyes are dull.  “I’m sorry,” she says.  “I think I’m not— I think I’m wrong.”

“No,” Spike says again.  “No.”

“Why not, because she tolerates you, now?” Giles shoots back, disgust dripping from his voice.  “That alone should have told you she wasn’t Buffy anymore.”

“Giles,” Anya murmurs.

Xander’s voice carols from the front lawn.  “Spike!”

“Shit,” Spike mutters.  He needs a minute.  He just needs a second to think.

“A little help!”

Spike takes a step back, then two, keeping his eyes on the others.  He points at Willow.  “You stay put.  Don’t bloody well do anything ‘til I get back.”

Willow nods.

“He’s not even meant to be here,” Giles returns, but Spike is pretty certain no one is listening to him, for once.

When he jogs out the front door, Sarah is doing some kind of measured breathing and Xander is holding a cross out between them.

“What happened?”

Xander takes a steadying breath.  “We’re okay.  But not sure we’re gonna be okay for much longer.”  He shifts on his feet.  “Is it—when they’re young, is it—the hunger, I mean—kinda unpredictable?”

Spike nods.  “First few days, anyway.  How’re you doing, pidge?”

Sarah doesn’t respond.  She keeps her eyes closed, keeps breathing.  She does shake her head.

Spike rakes both hands through his hair.  It’s not like he can run off to the butcher’s or even back to Restfield, where they still have a few bags of blood.  And he can’t offer a townie or two to Sarah, and Harris isn’t likely to offer and even if he did, Spike doesn’t trust Sarah’s control.

“Okay,” Spike mutters to himself.  “Okay.  C’mere.”

Sarah looks up warily, like she expects punishment.  What she gets is Spike’s wrist.

“What?  Ew,” she says, but she’s already mesmerized by the sight of his pale arm, and what it means.

“Oh, god, seriously?” Harris burbles.  “Do I have to watch this?”

“You can close your bloody eyes!” Spike shouts.  “C’mon, pidge.  Just enough to tide you over,” he cajoles, and Sarah gulps, takes his arm up in both hands, shifts, and bites down. 

Harris flinches, but he doesn’t actually close his eyes, not quite that missish.

Spike lets her go at it, talking to Harris.  “They’re saying that’s not Buffy, that she doesn’t have a soul!  You understand what that means?”

Xander looks like he’s been stabbed.  “We did it wrong.”

“So they say,” Spike hisses, hating him, hating them in that moment.  Sarah’s teeth sting.  Spike’s eyes sting, too.  “Or so Watcher says, but Willow and Anya and even Buffy herself seem well convinced.”

“Shit,” says Xander, pacing in a tight circle.  His hands rise up to grip at his hair.  “Shit.  Shit.”

Spike watches.  Harris is grieving all over again.

They’ve lost Buffy twice.

“But what if it’s okay, though?  I mean, you don’t have a soul,” Xander offers.

Spike gazes down at the adolescent vampire feeding at his wrist, looks back up again at Harris and raises one eyebrow.

“Okay, not exactly homesteading in the land of the healthy behaviors right now—”

“Why she’s so odd,” Spike murmurs. “So off.”  He sniffs.  “That’s enough to tide you,” he tells Sarah, who pulls away reluctantly.

Her control’s improving, he thinks, but the thought is faraway, like there’s gauze between this sensible thought and the rest of him.

“She wanted to bring Sarah home.  Like she didn’t understand what a vampire was.”  Spike wraps an arm around Sarah and pulls her into his side.  She goes, uncomplaining, her head tipping to Spike’s shoulder.  “You’re doing well,” he tells her, because no one else ever will.  “But she still wanted you in the house with baby sis.  Buffy wouldn’t agree to that, not ever.”

Sarah deflates.

Xander looks up.  “But what if Buffy knew the spell Anya was talking about?  To make a vampire safe?”

Spike sighs.  It feels strange that he’s the one breaking the illusion, or—no.  It feels strange not to be smug about it.  “Kiddies sensed you were a bit on my side, for once,” he says, lowly.  “They lied about that too, Harris.  Dollars to those donuts you like so much, there isn’t a spell like that.”

Harris opens his mouth to argue, pauses, closes it.  Tightens his jaw.  “Oh,” he says.

Now Spike has done the hard thing—the looking-after-people thing—he's free to begin spiraling, himself.  “It is Buffy.  It has to be her,” Spike murmurs, clenching his fists.

Xander’s face softens.  “I really hoped so,” he says, echoing their talk on the porch, and Spike knows what he’s doing by invoking that painful conversation—appreciates it, even.  “You’re a good,” he starts to say.  “I know you didn’t want,” he tries again.  Then, “I know you love her.”

Spike blinks.  Surprised doesn’t cover it.  “When did you figure that out?”

“Sometime this week, I think,” Xander says.  “But if that’s not Buffy—”

“I don’t care,” Spike says, suddenly certain.  “She’s Buffy enough for me.”

Xander tsks and looks a second away from rolling his eyes.  “That’s not how it works, Spike.  She’s Buffy or she isn’t Buffy; we don’t get to split the difference.”

“I don’t care,” Sarah says.  When Spike and Xander turn to her, she frowns.  “This Buffy is the only Buffy I know.  And you can’t kill her just ‘cause whatever she is doesn’t have a soul.  That’s not fair.”

“Kid,” Xander begins, but Sarah stamps her foot.

“No,” she interrupts.  “I don’t have a soul.  Spike doesn’t have a soul.  You didn’t kill us.”  She goes over even grimmer.  “I know you want your friend back.  But you don’t get to sacrifice someone else to make that happen.”

Xander looks thrown.  “That’s not,” he says.  And then he frowns, shifts on his feet and looks up at Spike.  “This is how it happens, right?” he says plaintively.  “I see your point of view once, just once, and then...”

“You can’t unsee it?” Spike fills in.  He squares his jaw.  “Good.”

Xander rallies.  “But I thought you of all people would want Buffy, the real Buffy, back,” he accuses.  “You’d want that, if you really love her as much as you say.”

“That’s not right,” Spike presses.  He licks his lips.  He has to say this properly.  Because a plan is taking shape in his head, one that requires Harris’s cooperation.  An owl sounds its distinctive call in the distance; somewhere a little further off, Spike can hear the hum of cars off of Route 2, and a blur of nervous Willow-chatter from inside.  Buffy is silent.

Spike can do this.

The rest of his life, Buffy’s life, hinges on it.

“Her soul’s in heaven,” Spike says clearly.  “Enjoying its eternal rest, after sacrificing everything for you lot.  For the world.”  He takes in a shaking breath.  “I want that part of her—that part of her that fought and loved and suffered and wept—I want that Buffy to be able to lay down her burdens.  She earned it.”

Xander’s eyes have gone shining.

“This Buffy,” Spike goes on.  “She knows and she loves you.  She knows and she loves Dawn and Willow and Watcher, too.  It’s because she remembers.  Memory, y’see, it’s a lot.  It’s nearly everything.  And she’s better, now.  She’s happy, now.  She’s free, now.  So when you say you want Buffy back, don’t try to tell me it’s for her sake, because it’s not.  It’s because you want her back precisely as she was, burdens and all.  For your own sake.  And that’s — that’s not love.”

Xander swallows.  “I can’t,” he sobs out a breath.  “It’s —it’s Buffy, Spike, it’s— how could I leave her there, how could we leave her behind, she—we should’ve— we should’ve done it right the first time if we were gonna do it at all, and I—I'm sorry.”

“So fix it,” Spike says, intent.  “Do the right thing, now.”

Spike hasn’t been familiar with the right thing in over a hundred years.

So when he bears with the pain of crossing the circle to toss Buffy over his shoulder and run for the van, Xander’s keys in his pocket, Sarah already ensconced in the back, he isn’t sure if what he’s doing is right, or good.  He’s saving Buffy like always, which has to be three-quarters of the way there.

They pick Dawn up from Janice’s house, just where Spike expected to find her, citing a family emergency.

It’s good: Dawn has toiletries, pyjamas, and a change of clothes.  It’s almost like they planned it.

Sarah reaches over the front seat to point urgently this way and that and ten minutes later, Dawn is running towards a darkened house; and ten minutes after that, she’s emerging with a cat carrier, a bag of food and a water bowl.

Spike spends half the first hour glancing at Dawn in his rearview mirror, unable to see Sarah at all.  But simply by getting Sarah’s cat, Dawn has joined the list of people the young vampire will never want to eat.  The girls get on like a house on fire, playing with Void.

Buffy is still worryingly silent and empty-eyed fifty miles down a stretch of empty highway.

They’re leaving Sunnydale, as fast as they can go.

Chapter Text

Her stomach hurts.

Her stomach hurts and her vision is blurry and her shoulders ache and Spike is next to her and Dawnie behind, and there is also a kitten somehow, but none of this is as settling to Buffy as it should be.

Because she isn’t Buffy, is she?  No wonder she likes Spike so much: they’re the same.  Hollowed-out, soulless shells with all the memories of their hosts.  Memory is a lot, she remembers telling him.

It’s all very well and good to be compassionate when it isn’t you, Buffy is finding.

Should she call herself Buffy?  Maybe she’s Not-Buffy.  Maybe she’s stolen Buffy.  Stolen Buffy’s sister and devoted vampire, and her devoted vampire’s baby vampire and cat, who are apparently a package deal.  Maybe she’s—what did Giles call them that time?—a changeling.  

Except Giles never called them that, not to her anyway, that’s not a thing that happened to her, that’s something that happened to Buffy or maybe not at all, and—

Oh.

“Dawnie,” Not-Buffy says, slowly.  “How did you figure out which memories were real?”

Conversation, which she’s only just now realizing was carrying on around her, comes to a crashing halt.  There’s a bit of a kerfuffle and then Dawn is squirming over to the front seat and throwing her arms around Not-Buffy's neck.

Not-Buffy automatically brings her arms up, only it’s not automatic, is it?  She remembers the first time someone touched her here, she had to file away that it felt good, to remind herself that it was supposed to feel good, like touch was something she’d read about in a magazine once, and that’s right, isn’t it?  She hadn’t experienced it.  She has ‘read all about it’ because she has Buffy’s memories but she’s not exactly Buffy—

Dawn is holding her and saying, “shh.  Shh,” and has started stroking the side of Not-Buffy's hair until she blurts,

“Don’t!  I’m not your sister.”

Dawn freezes for a second before pulling back just far enough so they can peer at each other.  Dawn’s cheeks are streaked with tears.

She can remember reaching out to touch those tears, like she’d never seen or felt them before either.  God, she’s a monster, a black hole, a nothing.

“If I’m your sister,” Dawn says slowly, bringing her palms up to Not-Buffy's cheeks to hold her in place, “then you’re mine.”

She stares.  And then begins to nod, slowly, as the facts sink in.  That’s why she asked Dawn, right?  Dawn knows.  Dawn’s been through it.  And what did she share with Dawn?  Memories, that was all, and they were secondhand and most of them weren’t even real, so if that makes them sisters then they still are, aren’t they?  Dawn reaches for her again, or maybe she reaches for Dawn and suddenly they’re clutching, and Buffy’s crying too—she is, she is Buffy, at least to Dawn—and then the balance slides further until Buffy’s comforting Dawn instead of the other way around.

“You’re not gonna leave again,” Dawn is saying fiercely.  “You can’t leave again.  I only just got you back,” and then she’s sobbing, and they’re a mess, but Buffy is back on solid ground, rocking Dawn side-to-side, thinking about Dawn coming back from her sleepover tomorrow morning and calling for her sister, only to have nobody answer.  And then how she might have wandered through the house looking, until someone—Willow, probably, with Tara alongside—told her the truth, what had happened, and—and—

Buffy’s imagination fails her and suddenly rage leaps up in her chest, filling all her empty spaces with the destructive speed of an inferno.  There’s room for very little else, but she turns to Spike and says it aloud, with the tiny space that’s left:

“You did the right thing.”

Nice to have some confirmation, at that, Spike thinks, and puts the radio on low to give the girls a minute to calm.

Sarah is still low on blood and it’s near midnight, and they’re traveling through the bloody desert in a demon-poor part of the world; there is a near-zero chance of an all-night butcher shop, now.

So they stop the car and Buffy and Dawn make sleepy noises, all tuckered out, but Spike hushes Sarah and they climb out into the dark.

She doesn’t ask what they’re doing; she follows him silently, her feet barely tapping the gravel: a little natural talent there, that’s good.  Together they move through the dark, the heat of the day lifting off the sand, still, a ghost of warmth.  He catches the jackrabbit himself to show her how it’s done, moving silent as the low breeze and only moving when it’s certain the animal’s fate is sealed, with a jolt nearly too fast for the human eye to perceive.  He shows her, too, how he holds a hand on either side of the animal’s neck, it’s beaded eyes wide, its body trembling with terror, and twists so its death is clean and no blood is lost.

Sarah looks a little green, but nods like a soldier and manages to catch an owl off a low branch twenty minutes later; she is so baffled when twisting its neck doesn’t work that Spike has to hold back some inappropriate hilarity before showing her to twist to the side.  She does and then manages to eat, albeit sloppily.

“Ugh,” she says, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand.  “It tastes like a chickenyard smells.”

“Yeah,” Spike agrees.  “Sorry, pidge.  Not particularly delicious, I know.  But you’ll be all right, now?”

Sarah looks dubious.  “One more.”

They hunt so long in the dark that Spike is getting worried about leaving Buffy and Dawn alone—half an hour goes by before they find large enough game to take.  It’s a pronghorn, a desert wanderer that would normally be asleep at such an hour.  Spike hopes it’s not ill with anything they could bring back to the girls.  Sure, vamps can’t catch anything, but they could carry something catchable back with them on their clothes or hands.  Still, Sarah takes off after the creature faster than Spike can warn her of his half-hearted objections, and so he, too, gives chase.

She gluts herself, half-starving for the sake of her human companions.  Spike has a little himself, since there is plenty to go around.  She’s getting to have impressive control for a fledge, but he still gives her some cooldown time before they head back: waits for her human face to return, for the wild look to leave her eye.  He wouldn’t want Dawn or Buffy to meet an undisciplined fledge who was still coming down from the rush of the hunt.

Spike finds himself toying with a fantasy of calling Riley and asking for Sarah to be fitted with the latest version of their chip.  She’s a good girl, it would just be a precaution.  He knows it’s absurd as he’s thinking it, and then he realizes: he is inventing impossible solutions because he is pretending he can solve an unsolvable problem.  What are they going to do?  Not tonight, not tomorrow, but forever and ever?

They wasted little, but they’re both splattered with arterial spray, and Sarah is a little messy around the mouth.  So Spike follows the mineral scent of springwater until they reach an oasis surrounded by grey rocks.  It is smaller than a backyard swimming pool and surreally blue in the moonlight.  He strips off his shirt, rinsing it out in the water as Sarah kneels to splash her face.  Sarah strips off her own shirt and does the same, either emboldened by the dark or newly certain of Spike’s place in her life.  Under, she is wearing a black cotton sports bra that seems mostly clean.  They wring their respective shirts out and toss them over the rocks while Spike takes a little more care with the blood under his fingernails.  Suddenly he recalls that was why he used to wear black polish.  He hasn’t thought of that in ages; he hasn’t had to think of that in ages.  Looking down at the half-moons of his nails in what feels like the start of a new chapter of his existence feels strange.

“What is it?” Sarah says, washing her hands, now, too.

The water is cold and sharp and nice.  Spike brings a few mouthfuls up in his palms and rinses the blood out of his mouth; spits, away from the water.  Maybe someone will want to use this oasis and possibly they don’t need to contract whatever that dying animal had, either.

“Dunno, just,” Spike says.  “Don’t know where I’m going but I’m happy where I am.”

Sarah laughs, bright and sharp in the moonlight.  Her grin cuts through the dark, big not because she’s feeling violent but because she’s happy, too.  He’s getting fond of her, he realizes.  There is more and more space in him for that kind of thing.  “Yeah, cracking the neck of cute fuzzies is not my idea of a good time, but it was fun, the hunting and stalking part.  With you,” she tacks on shyly.  “I keep getting the feeling things could be a lot worse, which isn’t always a great feeling—but it does make me appreciate that you and Buffy are the ones who found me.”

“Me too, pidge,” Spike agrees, and slings an arm around her hip, careful to keep his hand on the side of her trousers rather than landing at the skin at her waist.  “Now, let’s get back to the girls, shall we?”

“Aren’t I a girl?” she queries, smiling up at him wryly.

“Yes an’ no, the same way I’m a man; I’m also somethin’ else.”

They grab their shirts and then walk awhile in silence.  They’ve gone further than Spike thought, given their headlong rush into the night, and walking leisurely means it’s gonna take a while to return.  Sarah has tossed her wet shirt against her back and looped the sleeves together like a cloak as it continues to dry; Spike has his tossed over one shoulder like a prep boy from the fifties with his school sweater. 

“You did good back there, with Harris,” Spike says.

Sarah shrugs, crossing her arms under her sports bra.  “It’s true, right?  We don’t have souls.”

“Yeah,” Spike says, thumbing his nose.

“And Dawn—she wasn’t real until recently?  And Buffy doesn’t have a soul, either.”

“Mm.”

They walk in silence a little more.

“So we are the same,” Sarah says, like she’s checking.

“My ledger is a lot blacker,” Spike admits.  “I used to be a very bad man.”

Used to be, he thinks in surprise.  Used to be.  Used to be.

“I did terrible things,” he says.

“But you regret them.”

Does he?  “Some of ‘em,” he realizes.  He clears his throat.  “Anyway, I’m tryin’ to be better, now.”

“Cause you don’t have a choice.  The chip?”

“No,” Spike says, and nobody’s asked him any of this, which may be why the words coming out of his mouth are every bit as surprising as if they were coming out of someone else’s.  “Not even how it started, actually.”

“How’d it start?”

Spike’s mouth opens to say something about not being able to kill Buffy with the Gem of Amara, and then opens his mouth again to talk about not killing her when he was trying to get Dru back, and then opens it a third time to mention saving the world from Angelus.  But what he says is, “I met Buffy,” and that’s it, isn’t it? 

He remembers watching her fight on camera again and again the way people do with a footie player they really like, pointing out her ingenuity and her sense of fun, already as on her side as it was possible to be without donning a white hat and standing at her weak side.  And when Angel lost the soul and he imagined the young Slayer must already be dead, he’d felt this singular jolt of regret and something darker.  When he’d learned she was still alive, his first thought had been a startling, I’d better go help the girl, a stir of chivalry he’d thought long quiescent, if not quite so dead as the rest of him.  Buffy made something Williamish open its eyes from its long sleep, stretch, and turn to face the light.  And, well, the part of Spike that isn’t memory—the part that is crash and bash and maim—that part likes Buffy, too.  Her grace, her ferocity, and the way she weaves humor into her battles is something that part of Spike likes a great deal.

“I didn’t change straightaway, you see,” he goes on.  “It was just that I couldn’t get her out of my head.  At first I was angry, really angry, and then I was in love and angry, which is a state I do not recommend, pidge.  I was fit to be tied.”  He ducks his head and laughs.  “And then—this is recent, around about when her mum, Joyce, started getting poorly—my pride stopped mattering, 'cause she was suffering.  I stopped pretending to myself I didn’t love her, and it was like being freed from prison; it was that kind of relief. 

“From the moment I clapped eyes on her, I wasn’t myself.  It was like part of her soul went into me when I met her eye, and I had this, this longing for things to be different.  I wanted to be different.  I could say I changed to please her, but that isn’t quite right.  I admired her so, you see,” he says, and he hears that bit of William in his diction like he sometimes does, these days, “that I... I think I wanted to be like her, just a little.  Buffy was who I wanted to be when I finally grew up.”

“Wow,” Sarah breathes.  She shoves his bare shoulder with an open palm.  “You’re a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, aren’t you?”

“Guilty as charged,” he admits.

“Well, you just ran away with the woman of your dreams,” she says, “plus your respective kid sisters.  So I shoulda known you were like this.”

Spike eyes her; she eyes him back.  She’s called herself that on purpose, he divines, to see what he’ll say.

He slings a casual arm over her shoulder and ruffles Sarah’s shoulder-length hair with the opposite hand.  She wriggles away with a lot of disgruntled noises, but when he looks back, she’s trying to hide a grin behind her fringe.  Scoffing at him, she shakes out her drier shirt and yanks it over her head with much re-arrangement of the hair afterwards.

When they finally get back, it’s nearly morning.  Spike clambers into the driver’s seat and Sarah enters from the back; it’s only now that the girls wake.

“Hmmn?” says Buffy, nose wrinkling adorably as she turns and stretches in her seat.  “What happened?”

“Just a rest stop, luv,” Spike murmurs. 

Dawn doesn’t even wake enough for words, just makes a series of incomprehensible noises and falls back to sleep.  Spike puts the car in drive and puts the pedal to the metal; they’ll need to find a place to hole up in the heat of the day.

Spike wonders if they’ll be looked at askance for the way they divide up the rooms—Spike with Sarah, Buffy with Dawn—but Buffy’s and Dawn’s obvious siblinghood makes Spike’s and Sarah’s developing relationship look even more similar in context.  They get two rooms and the pair of vamps crash out, exhausted and replete.

Spike wakes at a knock on the door and has a moment’s panic—Sarah is nowhere to be found—but she’s on the other side of the door when he opens it, with Dawn.  The sun is low in the sky.

“We come bearing smoothies!” Dawn says excitedly, shoving an orange something-or-other at him.  The pair are all jittery with sugar and the delight of new mischief, Sarah looking over at Dawn from under her lashes now and again.  Spike thoughtlessly takes a sip and then draws it back to stare at it.

“I put hot sauce in!” Dawn exclaims, and Spike grins.

“You know, they say the way to a man’s heart is between the third and fourth rib, but I’m willing to make an exception,” he says, gesturing with the drink before taking another long sip.

Dawn giggles.  “So, where are we going?  You two were pretty mum yesterday, but I assume you have a plan?”

Spike blinks.

“Or you just grabbed everyone and fled.  Spike, that is so typical,” she moans in her best, little-sisterly form.  She easily susses out which bed is Sarah’s and flops on it, Sarah sitting next to her more carefully.  “So I say we keep going east and then we’ve got two options.”  She counts them off on each finger.  “Go south into the desert,” she announces.  “Basically, like, no one lives there.  No one’d ever find us.  Or we could go north and keep going north until we hit the edge of the country, or even into Canada.  There are whole days where it’s dark up there, you know.”

“You’d be all right with that, Bit?  It being dark all the time?  Hardly sounds like the place for a growing girl.”

Dawn folds her arms.  “Don’t be silly.  I won’t stay there forever.  In just three years, I’ll go off to college someplace else.  I can put up with anything for three years.  No, this is for the three of you.”

“But you’ll come visit,” Spike says, at a loss.  He’s somehow managed to forget that Dawn will keep growing older.

She smiles.  “Yeah, of course I will, silly.  But then it’s putting up with it for two weeks, or a month.  You guys need to do what makes you happy.  Hey, maybe we can just wander awhile until we find a place you really like, right?”

Wandering with the three sounds like a bit of all right to Spike, but far less so than it would’ve a year ago... before he was correcting the Bit’s essays and packing her a healthy lunch, and making sure the only shampoo she’d use was in his basket at the grocery.  How were you supposed to raise a girl on the road?  Not to say that others maybe hadn’t made do, but it seemed especially worrisome to choose this kind of life for Dawn when she had a bedroom and a school she went to and a best friend and a close-knit group of adults who’d all look after her time to time back in Sunnydale.

“...hot springs,” the girl in question was saying excitedly to Sarah between final slurps of her smoothie.  “See, that way, I figure we get the up-north, low-sunlight thing goin’ on but we get the sort of beachy vibe Buffy likes.”  She frowns.  “Liked.  Spike, did your tastes change when you got Turned?  Sarah?”

“No,” they say, simultaneously.

“Oh, okay.  So I guess preferences aren’t a soul thing,” Dawn concludes, unperturbed. 

“Where is Herself?”

At that moment, the question answers itself as Buffy knocks at the door.  The old Buffy was light on her feet, almost dancing, though every third or fourth time he heard her on the approach, that tripping step altered to an almost-drag of all-over pain; new and old wounds conspiring, though he wasn’t sure a human could notice.  Her step pattern is now careful, even, as though the ground could give way beneath her questing foot at any time.

Sarah scrambles off the bed to open the door and Buffy enters carrying a bag of food for herself and Dawn.  Chinese, according to Spike’s nose.  Apparently, smoothies aren’t enough for growing girls.

“So, Buffy,” Dawn says.  “North to hot springs, or south to the desert?”

“North,” Buffy decisively replies, and Spike blinks.

Buffy isn’t going to ask Dawn about school, or her friends, or—well, Buffy’s friends?  Spike frowns, thinking belatedly of Willow and Xander and how this is going to make them feel.  Even Anya.  He ruffles his hair distractedly.  Maybe he can find a way to call one of them, let them know the girls are, well, alive?  If Buffy up and disappeared on him, he’d want to know if she were alive.  And Tara, she’d been looking after Dawn just so much as Spike had.  There is a sudden squirm in his gut at the idea of Tara thinking Dawn is maybe dead, maybe because Spike didn’t care enough to keep her safe?

“Colorado,” Buffy is saying, pointing at the map.  “We’ve never been.  Right, Dawn?  We’ve never been?”

“How’m I supposed to know?” Dawn asks.  “I’m a mystical key!”

“I’m gonna—go for a walk,” Spike says.  “Y’need anything?”

Buffy looks up, gaze warm, and shakes her head.  She looks wide-eyed and soft-lipped, pleasantly surprised he’s asked.

Spike thrusts his hands into his leather duster as he walks through the parking lot and down the street.  The deserts run close, but unless he’s mistaken they’ve just come through the Mohave.  There is more desert behind them, to the west; just a little more scrub and sand to the east until that gives way to green.  He can see it in the near-distance in the remains of the sunset’s rays, along with some real city lights... he’s never been this way, before, doesn’t know where the hell he is. 

He has a quarter in the pocket of the duster.  He is flipping it over and over again between his fingers.

He strides up to the ancient payphone outside the five-and-dime—this is such a one-horse town that it ain’t even a 7-11, it’s still a mom-and-pop—and goes to slide the quarter home before the quarter doesn’t quite make it, an’ he realizes the payphone is older than that, yet.  He manages to fish a dime from his duster pocket and dials Buffy’s number.

“Hello?”  It’s Tara’s voice on the other end, sounding troubled.

“Glinda,” he says.

“Oh, Spike!” she exclaims.  “Everyone, it’s Spike!”

“It’s Spike, is it?” comes a familiar male voice.  “Give me the bloody phone—”

“Rupert.  Pleasant surprise,” Spike drawls, before he remembers he isn’t here to pluck at Watcher’s temper, even if he can play the man like a fiddle.  “Just callin’ in to report we’re all alive and kickin’—”

“Shut up, Spike, and put Buffy on at once,” Rupert says tightly.

“She’s not here,” Spike says.  Somehow he didn’t anticipate this.  Well, of course he didn’t.  He thought he was gonna be hearing from Willow or Tara or Xander at a stretch: people, he realizes now, he was counting on to hear him out.

“What does that mean, she’s not here?” Watcher demands.

“Well, she ain’t Buffy, isn’t that right?  So of course she’s not here.”  Spike curses himself again.  He didn’t mean it to go this way.  He should be asking Tara quietly to send Dawnie’s textbooks along, Buffy’s sushi pyjamas, Mr. Gordo.  Glinda could keep a secret.  Instead, he’s stuck arguing with a man who swears Buffy isn’t Buffy enough.  “You want to kill her, mate, so forgive me if I’m not bloody well inclined to give you a second crack at convincing her to leap off a tower.  She doesn’t even know I’m calling—”

“She— what?”

“I just thought, I’ve honor even if you’ve none, an’ if it were me left behind—an’ it usually is—then I’d want to know Buffy an’ the Bit are all right,” he says.  “Well, they are.  Done my duty an’ all, which is more than you’d do, if you were in my shoes.”

“Listen,” Rupert is saying, urgent, now.  “That is not Buffy, Spike.  I—I know you may not trust me, I know I’ve given you reason to despise me.  But please, for God’s sake listen.  Do not leave her alone with Dawn.”

Spike holds the phone a moment.  “Well, all right then.  Toodles,” he says, and joins the phone to its holster.

If he walks back real quick, nobody needs to know.

The shining town in the distance turns out to be Lake Havasu City.  Spike fully believes he’s hallucinating, before he manages to sputter, “what in the bloody blazes is London Bridge doing in Arizona?!”  And obviously the girls think he’s having them on, and continue to think he’s having them on until he sneaks them into the Lake Havaus City historical museum after hours.

Apparently, the London Bridge was dismantled, purchased and shipped from London to Arizona in the sixties. “It is the largest antique ever sold and the second-largest attraction in Arizona, behind the Grand Canyon,” Dawn reads to her agog audience. 

“See, it’s like you,” Sarah nudges him.  “From England... ancient... transplanted here...”

“Oooh, ooh!” Dawn shrieks, pointing at something else on the plaque.  “There’s a haunted tour!”

They clearly must do the haunted tour, although why a mystical key over a thousand years old and her vampire companion find ghosts thrilling is anybody’s guess.  Buffy holds his hand through the whole tour, though, and Spike guesses it doesn’t really matter, does it?

Two hours north is Vegas, and Spike insists on stopping.  He’s long since taught Dawnie to count cards, but she’s too young to gamble, so she amuses herself teaching Sarah how.

Spike gazes at them all.  “I’m gonna go make our dollars into hundreds, kiddies.  Hands and arms inside the vehicle.”

“Yes, Spike," Sarah drones, only to be elbowed by Dawn.

Spike sticks his head in on the passenger side to pin Sarah with a long glare.  “I’m gonna get some butcher shop fare; there’s a thriving vamp population in Vegas,” he explains.  “You holding out for now, pidge?”

“You bet,” Sarah replies, still absorbed in whatever tricks Dawn is trying to teach her.

“You all right, then?  Buffy,” Spike murmurs, resting his folded arms against the passenger side open window.  The night air is warm, and he’s with three of his favorite people in the world, about to make some money.  “You hungry?”

Buffy’s eyes twinkles.  “God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

“Oh, she remembers Scarlett O’Hara."

There had been lots of hot pretzels and snacks at Lake Havasu City, Spike reckons, and they’d had Chinese before that.

Still.

“I’ll bring you a sweet,” he promises, just to hear her groan.

Buffy and the girls walk past three ringing payphones before Buffy twigs.  “Go... look at some street jewelry,” Buffy advises Sarah and Dawn, who begin examining the wares of one of the sellers.  She picks up the phone.

“Buffy!”

It’s Willow.  Well, of course it’s Willow.  Unless Xander or Giles or Anya have a worldwide surveillance network she doesn’t know about, it would take magic to know where she's walking.

“Don’t hang up!” Willow says, and Buffy sighs, long and low, and doesn’t.  “I’m sorry,” Willow says.  “I’m sorry you died and I’m sorry I did a bad job bringing you back, I’m sorry I did it wrong, and I’m sorry I’m a rank amateur.  I’m sorry.”

Buffy pauses, awaiting the last sorry and unsurprised when it doesn’t manifest.  “You’re not sorry for trapping me and threatening to—kill?  Yeah, I mean I guess it applies—”

“I let Giles get to me,” Willow says lowly.  “He thought—he still thinks—you're dangerous.”

“And you don’t.”

“And I don’t,” Willow says, miserably.

Buffy wilts a little.  Her eyes prickle.

“I just figured, better safe than sorry and—Buffy, you know.  We were raised with this whole thing about souls.  I just, I didn’t know that you were you, you know?”  There’s a pause.  “I still don’t know that you’re you.”

“It’s okay.  I don’t, either,” Buffy replies.

“You don’t?”

“No.  I don’t feel like I do in my memories.  I feel...”  Buffy fumbles.  “Like I’m new.”  She sighs.  “Dawn thinks this just makes us the same.  I guess I know how she must’ve felt, back then.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line.  “I never thought you’d leave Sunnydale,” Willow ventures, eventually.

Buffy laughs.  “Why not?”

“Because it’s your job?”

Buffy ponders.  “What if I don’t want it to be my job?”

Willow sounds incredulous.  “You’ve never wanted it to be your job, Buffy.  I mean, I know you thought Slaying was fun sometimes, but it was a crap gig.  Bad hours, low pay... a thing you fixed, by the way.  I used your first paycheck mostly for the mortgage, and me and Tara are putting the monthly rent in and Anya suggested we use that for utilities...”

Buffy isn’t sure why Willow is telling her all of this, when it doesn’t matter, anymore.

“...But I figure the Council is planning on coming here, eventually, to see if you’re, uh, here.  Doing that job they’re now paying you for?”

Oh.  Right.  Buffy bites her lip.

“And, uh.  This is a Hellmouth.  Y’know?”  Willow gives a friendly pause, like someone waiting for a sloppy cast member to deliver a missed line.  “Buffy, if you... if you disappear, a lot of people are gonna get hurt.  A, a lot of people are going to die.”

“Oh,” Buffy says, slowly.

Oh.

That’s true.

They won’t just call another Slayer.

First, she’s not dead, she’s just... fled.

Second, it wouldn’t matter if she were dead, because the Slayer line runs through Faith, now.

Who’s in prison.

Huh.

This is a bad feeling.

“Buffy,” Willow says slowly, “Sunnydale needs a Slayer.”

“Well, maybe you can pick one up at the five-and-dime,” Buffy shoots back irritably.

“See, the thing is,” Willow goes on, “no one needs you to be physically present to return your soul.  Remember?”

Buffy freezes.  She is suddenly and acutely aware of the hot air moving past her arms, the dragging, invisible weight at her back, Sarah’s giggle as she holds a ridiculously overdramatic, oversized necklace up to Dawn’s throat, her strangling grip around the payphone.

“Buffy... Buffy?”

“You wouldn’t do that.  You wouldn’t do that to me,” Buffy blurts.

“No.  I wouldn’t.  But I’m not the only one in the world who can do that spell, Buffy.  There are others.”

Buffy worries her lower lip between her teeth.  She thinks she knows what Willow is trying to say without saying it, because she is trying to be loyal to one friend without betraying the other.  “Giles.”

A gusty sigh.  “Yeah.”

“How long do I have?”  Buffy’s voice sounds calm, rational to her own ears.  Inside, a maelstrom is building.  Her heart kicks in her chest; the little hairs on her arms stand on end.  The girls have noted something is wrong, are turning towards her.  Sarah has dropped the necklace she was holding and is striding back for Buffy in a way that speaks badly for anyone who attempts to get in her way.

“Not long,” Willow says.  “I’m sorry, Buffy.”

“Why did you tell me?” Buffy hears herself saying, just as Dawn reaches her elbow and leans a little closer to the phone.  “You didn’t even have to tell me.”

“Cause I don’t really know how this works, Buffy,” says the voice on the other end of the line, and it’s Willow, Willow, who said, oh, it’s okay, you don’t need to come back, that first time at the Bronze, and Willow, at her side fighting the mayor, and Willow, proclaiming Faith a skank during the body swap, and Willow, messing with Parker for her sake, and that Willow is telling her, your existence is about to come to an abrupt and ignominious end.  “Will you remember everything you’ve been through?  If you don’t, you need—you deserve—a chance to say goodbye—”  She suddenly clams up.  “A chance to do whatever you want with whatever time’s left,” Willow finishes carefully.  “And if you do remember, I want you to know I respect you and I love you enough not to let this be a surprise.”  There’s a pause on the other end of the line.  “...Should I not have said?”

“No,” Buffy says, numbly.

Dawn grips her shoulder, gaze on Buffy’s.

Buffy shakes her head minutely.  Later.

“No,” Buffy finishes.  “Thank you, Willow.  For telling me.  I think.”

Chapter Text

Buffy’s whole body is shaking by the time she hangs up the phone.  She realizes she does owe Willow: she owes Willow forever.  Willow has given her the rare chance she didn’t get with her mother or father: the chance to say goodbye.

She turns to the girls.  “We need to find Spike,” she says.

Dawn’s chin squares and Sarah gives her a sharp nod in response; neither girl questions why their outing has been cut short, and Buffy is so grateful she could cry.

But then Buffy realizes she has no idea where to look.  She hasn’t tried to use her ability to sense vampires since—since, but even if she were confident in her abilities, there is no guarantee following that thread back to its source would lead to Spike.  No, it’s far more likely that she’d lead the girls into a fight they may or may not be able to win.  Buffy hasn’t so much as thrown a punch since her return; secretly, she fears it will be like trying to lie: she simply won’t be able to do it.

So they return to the van, and sit in the back in a circle, and Buffy explains.

“They can’t!” Dawn blurts.  “They can’t do that!”

“Let's not say 'they’, though, Dawn,” Buffy corrects, gently.  “Willow was warning me.”

“C’mon!  She’s, like, a really strong witch,” Dawn explains briefly to Sarah before turning back to Buffy again.  “She could stop Giles if she wanted to!”

“Maybe not without hurting him,” Buffy protests.

“And?” Dawn presses.  “She won’t?”

Buffy purses her lips.  “No, Dawn, and I didn’t ask her to magically change his mind about it, either.  Giles is smart, determined, and resourceful,” she says, thinking of all the times he’d managed to save their collective bacon, “and—and flawed.  He’ll do this if he thinks it’s right, and it’s unlikely anything Willow or Xander could say would stop him.”

“So you’re just what, giving up, then?!” Dawn demands, tears gathering in her eyes.

Worse is Sarah’s silence.  Her small shoulders are hunching in further with every word.

Buffy retrieves Void from his little cage and passes the warm package off to Sarah, who cuddles him.  The girls are briefly soothed, even as Buffy’s gut continues to roil.

“I wasn’t thinking, or maybe I wasn’t remembering it very well,” Buffy goes on.  “Angel, I mean, and the soul.  Willow was nowhere near Angel when she performed it.  If I had realized, we might have had a better chance.  There might have been some mystical shield or a charm I could wear, or...”  She shakes her head.  “But listen,” she says, capturing her sister’s hands in her own.  “Dawn.  We’re getting this powerful, improbable chance to say goodbye—”

“Well, I won’t,” Dawn says, yanking her hands back and folding her arms.  “You aren’t fighting, you aren’t even trying—”

“I just don’t know what you’d like me to do,” Buffy murmurs to the carpeted van floor.

“Be angry!” Dawn orders.

“I, I was.  But I can’t, now.  I’m sad.”

Dawn looks up and her eyes are full again, and she’s shaking her head.

“Dawnie, I’m still gonna be here,” Buffy says.  It is hard.  She is speaking through what feels like a shattered sternum.  “I’m still going to be your sister, whatever happens.  That I can promise.”

“And what about me?  What am I going to be, when you get your soul back?” Sarah queries.

Buffy feels her lower lip wobble, orders it steady.  Sarah is holding Void up close to her cheek.  Void looks even blacker against the russet of Sarah’s hair.  They peer at Buffy out of near-identical greenish eyes.

The fact is, Buffy isn’t sure of the answer.  Out of all the things she’s said and done since her return, helping Sarah is the least characteristic, or so she’s been told.  She opens her mouth to be reassuring and, “I don’t know,” is what pops out.  And then, “I’m sorry.”

Sarah gulps, then nods.  “Okay,” she says lowly.  “Okay.”

That seems to be the end of the conversation, for now.  There’s nothing left to say.

Buffy curls on her side in the back to rest over the soft murmur of Dawn’s voice as she speaks comfortingly to Sarah.  Buffy recognizes through memory that instant bond that sometimes springs up between girls. Dawn won’t let Sarah go easily.

Spike’s made his hundred triple, so far.  He’s lost a few hands for the sake of verisimilitude, and he’s been careful not to look too excited.  Just your average Joe Human, trying to grow his paycheck on an otherwise-boring Friday night.

It’s summer’s end, and there are not a few frat boy types trying on one, last hurrah.  Spike joins a table’s worth, plays the fool a little: “how does it go, then, Three Card Poker?”  He loses twice, convinces the boys they have to give him a chance to earn his money back, and the three hundred becomes six, just as easy as the breathing he doesn’t need to do.

He’s not gonna become a millionaire today; if he tried, he’d get caught.  But those two hotel rooms had cost him nearly two hundred and Buffy’s morals might have shifted but he doesn’t like setting a bad example for the Bit, much less Sarah, whose morals might be a little more flexible if given half the chance.  So he’ll need to pay for things with good honest cash, or at least cash that looks at first glance to be good, and honest.  And they’ll need gas for the car and food for the girls.  A five-day trip is a thou, if it’s a dime.  So he plays longer than he might have if he were just after a fast Benjamin or two, never staying at a table very long.  When he has two thou’s worth of chips on him, he plays one more time, loses, says, “looks like my luck’s turning.  Think that’s my cue,” and winks at the redhead at cash out.

“Small bills, luv," he tells her, and stuffs them everywhere: deep in the pockets of his duster, his jeans, his bloody socks.  He was in New York City in the 1970s—he knows how to ensure you don’t lose everything if you get robbed, and Spike...

He’s got a bad feeling.

Maybe it’s leaving Sarah alone with Dawn and Buffy.  Maybe it’s that they’re on the lam together which—well, it’s a bit cozy, being in cahoots, he thinks, but also a bit troubling.  He wonders if the Bit is nervous; he hopes she knows he’d dust before he let anything happen to her.

But all that’s hard to do if he's apart from her for so long, so Spike picks up the pace, shaking his head slowly as if chagrined at his ill fortune.  Wouldn’t do to crow too loud ‘til he gets back to the ladies, just in case some hopeful is lurking about to catch some of Spike’s good luck for themselves.  Thieves often hang around the outsides of casinos, and Spike should know.

A payphone is ringing on the street; funny.  Spike thought that only really happens in the movies.  Plus, payphones are on the outs these days, what with most of the young carrying one of those tiny phones about.  Dawnie kept fussing at Buffy to get her one, before—before.  Had no idea how bad money was when Joyce was hospitalized.  Just knew she wanted to be able to talk to her little friends.

It’s only when the second payphone begins to ring that Spike gets the picture. So, Red wants to talk, does she?  Well, blast her; she’s had her chance to help.  Still, it might be good news—

No.  No, it most likely isn’t good news; it’s Red shouting at him to bring Buffy back to Sunnydale, kicking and screaming if necessary, unconscious if need be.  Hellmouth without a Slayer, after all.  Maybe their lot is thinking of offering him some dosh for it, he thinks, fist clenching around the cash in his left duster pocket.  Red can wait, he decides.

Red can rot.

It takes Spike a second to make sense of the scene.

Harris’s van is gone.

For longer than he’d like to admit, he believes he must be mistaken.  He gazes further down the street, checks the opposite site.  Goes a block further, comes back.  Retreats to the casino and retraces his steps.  Does pick up a pickpocket this time, who he takes great relish in shoving hard enough to make the bloke go a little white about the mouth and take his trade elsewhere.

It’s only then he remembers the phone calls.

Spike finds one of the many payphones Red rang, and stares at it.

Nothing.

What—she’s stopped watching?  No longer interested? 

A sharp thought spears him.

Were they all in trouble?  Had Red gotten hold of Buffy, who’d run back to Sunnydale to help, unable to wait for his return?  He runs a rough hand through his hair and fumbles in his pocket ‘til he locates the quarter he tried to use the last time, and dials Buffy’s number.

They’re out of state, now; the phone demands another coin.  Spike spots a likely looking older woman and begs a second quarter off her; he isn’t sure what’s written on his face, but it must be compelling because she rushes to help, and he doesn’t think from the look on her kind face it’s because he’s struck fear into her heart.

The phone rings; after two, someone picks up.

“Hello?”

Oh, it is Willow.

“Red.”

“Spike!”

“Why are you—is there somethin’ wrong?  Why were you tryin’ to catch my attention?”

“I told Buffy about the soul,” Willow says nonsensically.  “Did she tell you?”

“What about it?”  Spike’s dead heart has climbed up out of his chest cavity to lodge in his throat.  But there’s this queer feeling of inevitability about it, like he knows Buffy’s gone, like he always knew she would go.  She’s always being taken away from him.

Willow makes a strange little exasperated sound all her own.  It shudders through Spike how he knows these people; he could hear just that little noise and know immediately it was Willow Rosenberg who’d made it.  In a hundred years he’ll still know that.  “I thought she might not tell you,” Willow says, and her voice is concessionary, soft.  “The re-ensouling spell... Spike, it can be done from anywhere.  Buffy could run to the other side of the world.”  A beat.  “It wouldn’t matter.”

Yeah.  That’s it.  Spike can see it marquee-lights large.

The. End.

“Spike?  Spike.”

“Van’s gone,” Spike says.

“Uh— huh?”

“Harris’s van.  S’gone.”

“It got stolen?”

“I don’t think so, Red,” Spike says.  “I think she’s headed back your way.”

“She left you there?” Red squeaks.  Another beat.  “No, no, she doesn’t-- she won’t remember, Spike—Angel didn’t remember at first, when he got his soul back; Buffy... Buffy told me that.  Eventually.”

“She won’t remember?”  Oh, that’s bad.  That could be very bad.

Spike drops his arm down, though he can hear Red still squeaking on the other end of the line. 

Sarah.  She’d just be another vampire to Buffy.

No: she’d be a vampire next to her baby sister.

It rocks through Spike.  All this time.  He’d been so worried about Sarah’s control slipping, about her hurting Dawn, and—and now she was dust, if she hadn’t managed to cotton on in time and run, instead.

He picks up the phone again and puts it again to his ear.

“—home, Spike,” Red is saying, sounding desperate.

“What’s that?”

“Come back home,” she repeats.  “I don’t want you alone.”

This actually makes sense.  “That’s a good idea,” he hears himself say.

“You need a bus ticket?  I could send you money...”

“Your lot doesn’t have any bloody money.”  Spike paused.  “‘Cept Harris, an’ I stole his car.”

She doesn’t laugh.  “Spike.”

He sniffs, hard.  “Got plenty of dosh.”

“You aren’t... in a Hawaiian shirt kinda mood, are you?”

Spike blinks, then laughs.  “Oh, Red.”

“I could come get you.”

“How, on your broom?  Y’don’t drive.”

“I would figure something out.”  Stubborn.  Spike can see the Resolve Face now. 

“No, sweetheart.  I’ll come.  Harris there?”

“Not right now—why?”

“Tell him thanks from me.  See you soon.”

Spike knows right from wrong in his head, but not in his blood.  If things get a little too mad, he loses track. 

So right now, it’s Willow’s voice in his ear keeping him tethered.  Even with what he did, taking the girls with him, someone is gonna be not happy, maybe, but relieved to see him.  He can't go spoiling it by doing anything too sack-of-hammers.

Some quick inquiries and he finds a chop shop—he looks disreputable enough to want to sell to one—and nicks a motorbike from the thieves, one very bulky bloke chasing him halfway down the street in the dark.

He drives hours through the night—back through the Mohave, past Barstow, riding like the devil himself is on his heels.  If he rides fast enough, he can maybe even catch up.

Spike’s mind is an unfamiliar landscape in the dark.  He’s been mourning Buffy and worried about Buffy and now he isn’t either of those things, anymore.  A Buffy with her soul back and no memory is probably doing just fine.  She won’t remember coming back from the dead, or the coffin, or the wings.  Be nothing to bother her.  She isn’t a good driver, but just a few short turns and it’s highway from here to Sunnydale; she’ll be nervous but she’ll do what she has to, because she’s Buffy. 

But Dawn.  And Sarah.  What if Buffy decided to stake first and ask questions later?  Spike still isn’t sure that’s not the right decision, for fuck’s sake.  Though, what if Buffy tried to stake Sarah but was off her game?  What if Sarah lost control, hurt Buffy or, or Dawn?  What if Buffy won the battle and staked Sarah in front of Dawn?

The road becomes a nightmare of dark sameness, a stretch of everlasting nothing keeping him from the girls...

Spike has nightmares like this, Dawn all tied up atop that tower, and he’s climbing and climbing and never getting any closer to the top and then—the sound of a body hitting concrete— Buffy, or Dawn, or both, in that one dream that’d made him vomit when he woke up, and game over.  It was weeks of that before the clever ones started, the ones where he found a way to save them both, only to wake up and know there was only one reality, and that was the one where he’d failed them both.

So Spike relitigates reality in the dark.  Did Xander really give him the keys, or will he say the van was stolen?  Was Willow really troubled on the phone, or was it angry?  When Buffy remembers, is she going to think he was manipulating her, taking all he could get while he still had the chance, will she think—will she think he knew it wasn’t her, or that he should have known?  Maybe he should have—Harris knew, he knew something was wrong; maybe they all did, but they couldn’t admit it.  Buffy was back.  Buffy was back and that was all that mattered; how could anything else have mattered?

It’s just past four in the morning when Spike passes the Welcome to Sunnydale sign, and at the edge of the horizon is bathed in a false dawn.  Harris’s van is in the driveway when he pulls up to the curb, its engine still ticking.  Spike lets the bike fall where it will and then pauses just before the front porch.  Whatever this is, it’s going to be bad; he can feel it.  He takes a breath and ducks his head, barreling forward up the steps to the front door and another impression joins the cacophony in his head: he’s glad that he’s back, that they’re back.  Running didn’t feel right.  That’s why he called home; that’s why he was so glad to hear Red’s voice on the phone.  Something makes sense, for once.

He shakes himself and opens the door.

Buffy is formless, weightless, a being of light, of perfect joy. 

Then, Buffy is in Nevada.

She doesn’t know it’s Nevada, at first.    

Here is what she does know: there's the smell of Xander’s cologne and deodorant, Anya’s perfume.  Fresh wood shavings with a tang of decay at the back of the tongue, like rot and mold.  Old furniture.  There is carpet under her cheek, which is why she can smell all of these things together.  She pushes herself up: Xander’s van.  She doesn’t remember how she got here, though she searches her thoughts more and more frantically.

By the time she’s gasping in shock, someone is holding her tight, and something in Buffy knows immediately that it’s Dawn, Dawn, that somehow she’s back and alive and Dawn is safe, which is really, really good news.  She’s still settling back into her body, but Dawn is here and alive and in her arms and that helps.

When Dawn pulls back, Buffy takes her in.

Girls Dawn’s age grow fast: her cheekbones and eyes make her look older, and her hair, braided away from her face, has gotten very long.  She’s wearing casual vacation clothes, shorts and a tee shirt.  As Buffy’s senses flare to life, she can smell Dawn’s shampoo and clean girl-sweat and feel—

Vampire.

Buffy scrambles back, groping for a stake, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing at the back of her own shorts or anywhere in the car—wait, Xander keeps stakes in the glove compartment, so she’s scrambling to lean out across the front seat and this is all before she registers the girl in the corner of the van, wide-eyed.  Buffy grapples for the stake in the glove compartment and turns back to the vampire in the van.

In the van, with Dawn.

But the girl-vampire isn’t moving.  She’s sitting, wide-eyed, pressed to the back double-doors.  One of her hands is extended, palm up, don’t shoot.  She’s breathing, fast, and her eyes are big and green, and there’s a... there’s a cage with a little black cat inside that she’s gripping with her other hand, claw-like.

Buffy frowns.  For some reason, there’s a vampire here, a vampire that looks Dawn’s age.  With a cat.  And for some reason, that vampire isn’t doing anything threatening.

Dawn knee-walks to plant herself between them, but Buffy grabs her by the waist and hauls her back.

“Vampire, Dawn!” she shouts, and her voice is hoarse and sounds a little weird in the ear.

“Yeah, I know!” Dawn returns.  “Sarah!  We’re traveling with her and Spike!  We’re in Las Vegas.”

Buffy blinks.  Looks at the young vampire, who’s nodding, still looking horrified.  Looks back at Dawn.

“It’s a long story, okay?” Dawn says.  “Look, if we just wait for Spike to get back—”

“What?  No.  No,” Buffy says, because she knows that’s wrong.  She pictures dumping this little-girl vampire out in—where the hell are they?—but she can’t, of course, because vampires kill people, and the thought of staking a little-kid vamp makes her stomach churn and it’s not, like, doing anything, and if Dawn’s right, then it’s not been doing anything.  She’s ended up in some bizarro-land where she’s on the road with two vampires, and none of this makes sense but it isn’t like she hasn’t allied with vamps before: see Angel, Spike.  Even Harmony, she guesses.  Sorta. 

But no way is she waiting for Spike to show up and, and...

And what?

Suddenly, the question is unanswerable.  Spike will show up and ______.

A dozen answers war in her head.  Fight her and argue with her and be annoying and considerate and get that look on his face like he, like he cares, which he literally can’t, except he did, didn’t he, for Dawn?  Or for her, because he wanted to get in her pants, or there’s some kind of—she's taken psychology—psychosexual need to overpower her because he can’t kick her ass and drink her blood, so he has to, like, replace that with something.  And then the thought gives her a little guilty twinge, because she suddenly recalls his speech at the very end: you treat me like a man.  She was, she was doing that, because he was kind of acting like one?  There towards the end.  Which wasn’t the end after all, as it happens.

She can’t do this.

She can’t.

Buffy scrambles to reach under the front seat to where she knows there’s rope, and manages to tie the vamp to the back door and engage the child locks before it gets the idea it could probably survive a jump at speed.  All the while Dawn hisses and spits alongside the little black cat until Buffy turns the music up too loud to hear them, and points the car west.

Halfway there, the vamp starts complaining it’s hungry, shouting over the music.  Buffy isn’t inclined to stop, but Dawn threatens to open the side door and roll out into the road, and Buffy doesn’t think she’ll do it but she does recognize it means Dawn’s serious, so they manage to get a little raw hamburger from an all-night diner to tide the vamp over.

The vampire cries a little as it eats.

Buffy turns the music up again.

Maybe dying is good for something: Buffy reaches Revello Drive without once panicking on the road.

Buffy enters and blinks in surprise, because her living room is full of people: awake people, despite that it’s nearly four in the morning.

Giles is turning from the sitting area, as though she caught him mid-pace.  Xander is sitting on the couch and Anya’s head is resting in his lap; she’s snoring softly.  Willow is sitting on the other end of the couch, holding a mug; the smell of fresh-brewed coffee permeates the air, as though the group has just brewed a pot.

Buffy lets go of Dawn’s arm—her sister wanted to stay in the van, with the vampire—and blinks at everyone.  “What’s going on?” she says, but everyone only stares.

“Buffy,” Giles says, slowly.  “Is it really you?”

“Yes, it’s really me.”

Giles gives this little laugh-sob and suddenly he’s embracing her.  Blinking, Buffy lifts her arms to return the hug.  Then he pulls back just far enough to carefully peer into her eyes, critical, like he’s searching for a flaw in a gem.  One of his cheeks is a little pink, like he slept on a scrunched-up pillow.  “It is you,” he pronounces, and brings one hand up to the side of her hair.

“Well, yes,” Buffy says uncertainly.  She turns to Willow and Xander in hopes they’ll shed some light on this mysterious behavior, which doesn’t quite align with being welcomed back from the dead.

Willow is on her feet and has moved to stand opposite Buffy and Dawn, stretching to peer behind them as if expecting to see someone else; Xander shifts out from under Anya, pushing a couch pillow under her head to join Will.  “Are you okay, Buffy?” Willow queries softly, like she thinks Buffy’s got a migraine, or something.  “Nothing’s wrong?”

“Is nothing wrong?” Buffy echoes, incredulous.  “The last I remember, I was jumping off a tower to save Dawn’s life--”

Dawn hiccoughs, and Buffy would normally comfort her but she needs a moment—

“--and then I wake up in Las Vegas in a van with Dawn plus a vampire and also a kitten?  And none of you are surprised!  What, was my body walking around without me?”

“You were soulless, Buffy,” Giles says, carefully.

Buffy feels herself go cold all over.  “Oh.  God,” she says.  No soul means...

No wonder she was traveling with two vampires.  She was one of them.

It’s a miracle she didn’t harm Dawn, but then Spike has always seemed to like Dawnie hanging around.  Maybe he’d stopped her...

She looks up.  They’re all still alive, she registers, slowly.  They’re all still alive and even though she doesn’t see Tara, there is a good chance Willow wouldn’t have that faintly troubled look on her face but be sobbing or casting curses if Buffy had hurt Tara.  Everything looks fine from here.

Everything seems intact.

Willow’s expression goes from faintly troubled to distressed.  “Oh.  No!” she says, waving her hands in negation.  “Nothing bad happened!”

Giles rolls his eyes.  “That's a matter for debate.”

“You were, well, confused,” Xander says.  He also looks like he’s waiting for someone else to show up in the doorway, too.  “Dawn?”

Dawn groans.  “Sarah’s asleep in the van.  Also, tied up.”

Xander peers outside.  “Sun’s gonna rise.”  He looks at the van, then off into the horizon, then back at Buffy and Dawn again, frowning.  “You left Spike in Vegas?”

Buffy feels a little abashed for the first time, maybe because there’s this hint of disapproval in Xander’s voice.  She remembers all over again that Spike saved Dawn; that he’s practically a Scooby, even if she doesn’t, can’t, fully trust him.  She left him with no way home.  Like, okay, so she panicked, what with the kid vamp in the backseat and no way to prevent it from going all dusty if the sun rose without any money for a place to stay, or even enough to top off their gas, with the tank ticking towards empty, and Spike can take care of himself, but—but she still feels a little squirmy.

She should celebrate feeling guilty.  It’s probably a luxury she didn’t have a few hours ago.

“Oh, Buffy,” Willow mutters, but mostly to herself.

“Well, he can’t find the kid trussed up in the van,” Xander observes.  “We can do a disinvite later.  C’mon,” he says, and pushes the front door open.

Buffy only absorbs the implications once Giles starts to protest.  “Xander, you cannot invite an unchipped vampire into Buffy’s home!” he shouts, and Anya stirs.  Giles presses his hands to Buffy’s shoulders in this comforting way as he eases past her and outside, like he’s consoling her for being gone, but something’s weird, here.  Xander seems concerned about the baby vamp, and Willow looks disappointed in her, both of which are weird reactions to your friend coming back from the dead, or to your friend’s soul being returned to her body. 

Unless you’re about to stab someone in the chest and toss them into a hell dimension, souls returning?  Is usually good news.

The engine is still ticking when Xander opens up the backseat, yanking hard on the back door without realizing the vamp’s tied to it, which of course wakes the thing.

“Xander!” the vamp says, and suddenly there go the waterworks, again.  “Spike, she left him—!”

“Okay,” he says, and very carefully clasps her shoulder before turning to Dawn.  “Guessing she needs something to eat.”

“Spike left some stuff,” Dawn says, and runs back into the house.

Spike’s stuff?  Like Spike was staying in the house?  There’s too much information, now; Buffy’s head hurts.

“Xander,” Giles is saying lowly, more furious than Buffy's ever heard him.  “You will not untie that vampire, no matter how young it looks.  I don’t know what madness has gripped you the past few days, but—”

“Madness?!” Xander snaps.

Buffy straightens, taking a half-step back.  Anya is in the doorway, looking out at all of them, scared.  Willow is moving to flank Xander, though she angles to avoid turning her back on the vamp.

“No, man, madness is returning Buffy’s soul to her as a surprise.  You’re really lucky she didn’t just stake Sarah on sight!  You’re lucky ensouling her went okay, that we didn’t screw up again!”

Buffy has never heard Xander yell at Giles, never heard Xander yell at anyone but her, actually, and even then he gets cold and sharp, not like this.  Dawn comes rushing out of the house with a bag of blood like that’s something they just keep around, now, and clambers to the vamp’s— Sarah’s— side, opening the baggie for her and holding it close to Sarah’s lips.  Sarah looks pained and thankful and sips slow and careful as Buffy watches.  The sun is coming up in half an hour, probably.  She isn’t sure what to do with the vamp besides stake her or watch her, and she wants to go back inside.

“Okay,” Buffy says, abruptly.  “Yeah,” she adds, nodding at Sarah, who looks tired, and shocky, and very sixteen, short hair all smushed up on one side from where she was sleeping, like the human girl she isn’t, anymore.

Sarah straightens, blinking.  “You mean—”

“Yeah,” Buffy repeats.  You can’t take a kid on a road trip and then let them burn to death, whether they’re a demon or not.  Getting a kid to believe in you and betraying her is Evil-with-a-capital-E, and this is definitely a kid, in both senses of the word: she’s a new vampire and she was Turned young.  Buffy will be cautious, but she can’t harm something so young that trusts her.

Dawn is immediately pulling at the ropes around Sarah’s hands, the vamp still looking dazed with sleep and shock.  Buffy tries and fails to reconcile the evidence of her eyes, but she has this feeling, suddenly: the kid’s okay.  Buffy suddenly remembers an alley, feeding her slow, and it should make Buffy sick, but it doesn’t; they’re talking about geometry and Sarah’s gaze is broken and sad and scared.  But Buffy isn’t scared; she’s got someone watching her back in the memory, someone strong.

She blinks the image away with a little shake of her head, only to realize Giles is coming forward to yank Dawn’s hands away, and then suddenly Buffy's had enough.  She scoops the kid up like a sack of flour, still tied at the wrists—Buffy had been careful and Dawn’s efforts to untangle her knotwork have, so far, been ineffectual—and marches her to the house, the others scrambling after her. 

The bundle in her arms has started to giggle a little, humor and hysteria, when Buffy says, “wanna come in?  Good,” and carries her over the threshold.

“Buffy!”  Giles shouts as Buffy sets the girl on her feet and turns, folding her arms and planting her feet.

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on,” she says grimly, “but I’m not sure what made you think you could order me around, Giles.  Haven’t ever been the falling-in-line type, something you initially fretted over and more recently, have seemed to enjoy.  I’d hate to think we’re moving backwards.”

“That’s right!” Anya says, moving to stand beside Buffy, folding her arms, too.

Which is surprising, but Buffy will take all the support she can get.

Willow circles around too, then, and she’s not wearing Resolve Face but its flatter, stonier cousin.  “Or maybe you thought you could replace Buffy with someone more willing to take direction,” she says as Dawn and Xander come back inside, closing the door behind them.

A picture is beginning to come together; one Buffy isn’t sure she likes.  “Giles, you put my soul back?  Or, or you got someone to do it?”

“Yes, well, Willow refused,” Giles bit off.

“Not refused,” Willow says, nervously.

Buffy turns her face away, looking up at Giles out of the corner of her eye.  “...Why?”  She wonders who’s riding a motorcycle through a residential neighborhood like this so early; it’s loud.  Xander and Willow and even Dawn look conflicted.  She thinks it wasn’t some stranger who came back.  It was her, or some version of her.  A version Giles didn’t like.  She tilts her head to the side.  That motorcycle, it’s close, now. 

And then the door is opening without a knock, and it’s Spike on the other side.

Spike is brought up short by the presence of so many people—he'd expected no one to be awake beyond Buffy and Dawn, and half-expected them both to be upstairs already.  He takes them all in: Xander, Anya, Red tense and unhappy, Giles fuming, and Buffy fine, just fine, exactly as he’d figured, albeit a little pale and puzzled, and then he’s woven through the crowd and there’s Sarah, sitting on the bottom step of the stair, red-eyed and sleep-mussed and trussed up but whole, still whole, and there’s something bubbling inside of him, something dark and red, like a volcano about to blow. 

Sarah must see something on his face because she loops her tied hands behind his head and leans forward, and Spike clasps her, hard.  “You’re all right,” he says, and then, “you all right?”

She nods against his shoulder, still tense and troubled, saying, “we’re okay,” and that makes Spike recall Dawn, second priority since he was sure Sarah’d been staked—

He was sure.  In that long, desperate ride through the dark, he’d gotten more and more sure with every mile that Sarah was dust, that Dawn’d seen it, that whatever bond remained between Dawn and her sister would be strained to snapping or worse, that Dawn might’ve lost her grip, a little.  When Sarah pulls away, unhooking her restrained hands from around his neck and settling back on the stair, Spike feels dizzy because the worst, it hasn’t happened, for once.  He stands and catches himself on the wall.  “Dawnie?”

“Here,” comes a voice, and Dawn is there, right at his elbow.  “She’s okay, see?”  Spike wraps his arm around her neck, pulls her in, but she’s still talking.  “We’re okay.  Buffy’s okay.”

Spike turns to Buffy, and the way she’s looking at him—if he had any skill with paint or pencils, that’s just the configuration he would’ve drawn the lines of her sweet face.  Wary, troubled, gazing up at him out of the corner of her eye.  Lines of her body balanced like she’s ready to fall into a fighting stance, or flee.  “Yeah, I’m here, too,” she echoes sardonically.

Spike’s lips pull into something like a smile but also unlike.  “Knew that one, pet.  Knew you’d be right as rain.  But the girl—I thought you might’ve...”

“Almost,” says Buffy, then reconsiders.  “But also: no way.”

“Buffy,” Giles interjects, but Buffy holds up a hand. 

“No, Giles,” she emphasizes.  “She hasn’t hurt anyone.”

“You can’t be sure of that,” Giles counters.

“We can,” Spike interrupts, shooting a quelling glance at Rupert.  “Buffy plucked the chit straight out of the earth, like a bloody carrot.  Either she or I have had an eye on her ever since.”

“And that is meant to be comforting?” the Watcher presses.  “Since you can’t kill, you could keep her as a kind of hunting dog--”

“Aaand that’s it!” Xander announces.  He strides over to the door and opens it into the early dawn light; Spike sidesteps the glow.  It’s diluted enough by the time it reaches the stairs not to harm Sarah, who moves her hands around in the dregs with idle curiosity.

“Hey!” Buffy objects, standing in front of the door.  “What the hell, Xander?  Where do you get off?”

“Exactly the same spot Giles got off when he tried to call Sarah a dog,” Xander replies, hotly.  “C’mon, Buffy, you know that’s not right.”

Buffy folds her arms.  “All the same, I think I’m the one who gets to decide who gets kicked out of my own house!”

Xander relents, taking a step back and swinging the door shut with the tips of his fingers.  “Fine.  But,” he added, turning to face Giles, “you’re really out of line, and I think you know that.  What are you trying to do, provoke him into taking a swing?  If that’d worked, I’d been laid out about a hundred jokes ago.”

Spike nods, solemnly, pointing.  “That’s true.”  He’s still a little surprised by Harris’s support; Harris doesn’t appear to change his mind, once it’s made up.

Giles rolls his eyes.  He looks at Buffy, Sarah, still on the step, Spike, and back to Buffy again.  “I’ll sleep on the couch, in that case,” he says.  “Someone needs to be cognizant of the danger, if all of you have lost your minds.”

Willow moves to Buffy to embrace her, then draws back just far enough to grip her by the shoulders.  “Buffy,” she says, eyes shining.  “I am so, so glad you’re back.”  And Spike gives the little witch credit: she means it, and she’s doing her best to aim that meaning in Buffy’s direction, like the point of a spear, so Slayer can tell she means it.  He knows Red had gotten used to, even attached to the new Buffy.  But she’s doing her best, now, to show Buffy she’s glad to have her around.  She shoots a meaningful glance at Xander, who embraces Buffy with similar sentiment.

For a moment, he thinks Anya will stay hanging back, but after a moment she, too, embraces Buffy, though she doesn’t say anything.  Given her penchant for honesty, that’s probably for the best.

The party breaks up after that.  Dawn, after much cajoling and an earnest promise from Spike to look after Sarah, retreats for bed.  Giles moves to the downstairs bath to ready himself for sleep as well.  Buffy fusses awhile down in the basement and then awkwardly announces Sarah can sleep down there for tonight.  Spike is pretty sure by that point that no one is going to stake Sarah, even Giles, and retreats to the shade of the back porch for a shaky smoke.

This seems to have been some invisible signal, because he’s barely gotten the thing lit before Willow and Xander follow him out, arraying themselves to the left and right of him.  No one says anything for a minute or two.

Then, Willow winces.  “Should we be returning a stolen something?”

Spike shifts on his feet.  It was Willow’s voice he heard in his head over the past few hours, keeping him steady.  “Not exactly,” he hems.  “Uh, I stole something stolen.  If we check the VIN, we should be able to alert someone, yeah?  I saw the guy, I can make up a story about him selling me something hot.”

Willow shakes her head.  “Nah, listen: drive it a few blocks away, or maybe—yeah, outside of the college—and I can report I found it there.  They can’t suspect thousands of college students at once, so no one else’ll get in trouble.  It’ll just be one of those things.”

“Leaving me in the clear.”

She gives a sharp little nod, and he could hug her too; he really could.

“Sorry about the van,” Spike says, to Xander.

Xander looks at him oddly.  “I said you could take it.”

“Yeah, but... sorry, anyroad.”

There’s another space of quiet, but the Scoobies don’t go inside.  Instead, they stand next to him looking out into the yard, birds sounding to announce the morning.  He wonders what they’re waiting for.

“So she’s gone, again,” Xander finally says. 

“And back again,” Willow reminds him, leaning out over the banister like Spike is.

Spike sighs, blows smoke away from them.  “Rupert’s right.  Should’ve known it wasn’t her when she liked being around me.”

“Don’t say that,” Willow murmurs, clutching at his arm.

Spike swallows, and turns to face her, then Harris.  “I won’t forget this, y’know.  These past few days.  These past few months.”

Willow goes on tip-toe to kiss his cheek, and then, before Spike can decide whether he’s pleased or shocked or even a bit angry, she’s crying as she settles back on her heels again, covering her eyes with both hands.  “It’s my fault.  It’s my fault!” she sobs, and Spike wraps his arms around her and Harris from the other side and they stay like that awhile, shaking with Willow, until the light gets a little too aggressive for Spike’s tastes, even under the porch overhang.

“C’mon.  C’mon, Red,” he murmurs, soothingly, and chivvies her in.  She’s nodding like she’s listening to some soothing internal voice when Spike steers her inside, Harris right behind them.

After Willow’s slunk upstairs and Xander and Anya have driven back to their apartment, Spike creeps down to the basement, trying to let Sarah sleep. 

Buffy has laid out a little roll-out cot with sheets, pillow and blanket, more than Spike would’ve bet on.  Sarah’s hands are still tied together, and she’s curled so that they rest in front of her face on the bed.  Teartracks are still on her cheeks, but she’s patently asleep, breathing deep and needless.  She’s like Dawn, so terribly young, and his to protect; but for the first time Spike realizes he also sees himself: a what-if version of Spike, who might be very different if he’d received such care as Sarah has, rather than Angelus’s tender mercies.  Who might have deserved better.

He curls up on the floor parallel to the bed, and then the disaster’s over and this is when the mourning period begins, isn’t it?  But he can’t summon grief.  There is that everlasting fragment lodged behind his breastbone: the part of him that would always hurt because he’d lost her. But the rest of it has finally, finally bled out of him, and even this latest loss won’t summon more, or worse.

He read, once, that it takes six months on average for people to grieve someone dear to them, so he’s very much on schedule.  He resents it, fiercely.  Somehow, no matter how his universe revolved around Buffy; no matter how she changed him, twisting him around the shape of her...

He’d still shown up for Dawn at her parent-teacher conferences and insisted she do her homework. He’d helped arrange the bloody funeral when Willow asked, he’d kept looking after all of them, even though that wasn’t what he’d promised.  He was like a zombie that had been hollowed of everything that mattered, but kept moving, kept doing, lurching forward on the power of habit, and honor, and sheer bloody-mindedness.

And now it’s over, is that it?  He’s over it, now?

You’re allotted six months of grieving time, and he’s so faithless that he's run out after five?

He wishes he could say something like this to anyone upstairs: not to Dawn, it isn’t her job to counsel him, but Willow or Tara, Anya or Xander.  But it feels shameful to have the love of your unlife’s death shake you like an earthquake and not even manage to crack the foundations.  He should have every right to have gone sack of hammers, but it didn’t happen; he’s still here, and he’s still him. And now Buffy’s here again; the Buffy that doesn’t give a flip about him, but that also doesn’t feel like it’s worth grieving: it feels like she was never really here.

Spike feels tingly-numb, and sad, and sorry.  He just wishes--

There’s no way that sentence ends.

He can’t picture anything at all.

Chapter Text

Two weeks after her madcap drive through the desert and back to Sunnydale, Buffy wakes up and goes downstairs, where she finds Willow and Tara and Dawnie eating cereal.  Sometimes she comes down and they’re eating eggs and bacon and toast, but it’s usually cereal or sometimes Pop-Tarts, because they are busy ladies focused on their educations.  Willow even has a part-time job at the Espresso Pump these days, even though it’s running her a little ragged.  When Buffy asked about it, Willow gave her this funny look and said they needed the money.

It’s been two weeks and Buffy still hasn’t decided if she’s going back to school, yet.  She’s not sure what the point would be.  To say that she did?  School is for gaining skills for gainful employment, not just messing around.  So maybe she should just get a job?

Anya has been strongly urging her to do so, though Giles has emphasized the importance of thinking things through.  Buffy knows how much money means to Anya, so that's probably why she’d looked so scandalized when Giles said it.

She’s brought out of her abstraction by Dawn saying, “...so Spike’s gonna come over and help.  Buffy, is it okay if Sarah comes, too?”

“Help with...?"

Dawn rolls her eyes.  “Honestly, weren’t you listening?  My essay.  For English?  Spike always helps edit my essays,” she supplies.

“You say that like those words make sense in that order,” Buffy says, pouring a cup of coffee from the pot.  Ahh, coffee.  One of the nice things about Willow working at the Espresso Pump: she gets the employee discount on whole beans, and the house has started smelling a lot nicer in the mornings since she did. 

But Dawn isn’t willing to play.  “They do,” she snaps.  “I get if you don’t get it, Buffy.  I’m trying to be understanding, I swear.  But do you know how hard it is for Spike to be, like, the one who was always here, only to have him be practically disinvited from the house? Or how hard it is for me?”

“I didn’t,” Buffy says, in alarm, cupping her hands around her steaming mug.  “I didn’t do that.”  Something in her stomach flips.  “Does Spike think I did that?”

“I don’t think so,” Tara says carefully.

“I think he’s doing that thing where he plays fill-in-the-blank with other people’s emotions,” Willow explains.  “If you want him around again, you’ll probably have to say so.”

“Oh,” Buffy says, slowly.  “I thought he might not want to see me.”

She didn’t mean to say that, she thinks.  Lately, things have been popping out like this, like there’s no barrier between her thoughts and her mouth.  Disinhibition, Professor Walsh would have said.  Maybe she has a brain injury.  From all the death.

“It’s just, like, Other Me didn’t have a soul.  Spike and her probably had a lot more in common, but Other Me was enough like me to be mistaken for me, so it was like a me he could relate to?”

“Oh, Buffy,” Tara says.  “I don’t think that’s it.”  She’s packing food for Willow: Buffy watches as a glass container filled with baked ziti, a hunk of homemade bread, a can of soda, and an apple make their way into Willow’s cute little insulated bag before being put back in the fridge for Willow to grab when she’s ready to leave for the day.  Tara makes meal-and-a-half bags because Willow is out of the house for so long between her classes and her part-time job that she’ll get peckish again before she gets home, and again—they're trying to save money, so they aren’t eating out as much. 

“You guys really need to talk to each other,” Dawn grumps, “and not at me.  This evening, for example, great opportunity to talk to each other and not at me.  Be around, Buffy.”

She should do that, then.

She will.

“Okay.  And Sarah can come along, since I’ll be here to watch her,” Buffy agrees.

Dawn squeaks with joy and throws her arms around Buffy’s neck with many thank-yous.  She’s only distracted from her affections when she hears Xander beep for her.  She grabs her lunch from Tara—when did Tara start doing that?—and her books, and darts out the door.

Spike at the door is deferent, keeping his eyes dipped, but Sarah spoils the somber mood by grinning at Buffy, bouncing on her toes.  Buffy gives her a careful nod, and Sarah seems to take that as some kind of permission, because she crosses the threshold and wriggles into Buffy’s arms.

Buffy’s senses go haywire: some teen-girl shampoo in her nose, the ruffle of Sarah’s short hair on her cheek, the pressure of Sarah’s arms at her waist and that sixth sense of hers going vampire-vampire-VAMPIRE! like a klaxon.  Sarah pulls away and clatters into the living room where Dawn’s sitting and Buffy is left standing there, every hair standing on end.  Her whole body gives an involuntary shudder.

She looks up, and Spike is still standing there, gazing at her with these troubled eyes.

She straightens.  For some reason, one hand lifts to her hair.  “Thanks,” Buffy starts to say, just as Spike pipes up.

“All right, pet?”

Buffy looks up again.  That look on his face.  She knows that look.  So careful of her.  So open, like you could look into his eyes and see—well, not his soul, obviously.

He shakes his head, shifts on his feet.  ”Sorry,” he mutters.  “Staring.  Just.  Glad you’re here, in whatever form.”

“Spike!” Dawn calls from the living room.

Spike quirks one side of his mouth at her.  ”Duty calls,” he says, heading the girls’ way.  Then, on gazing over Dawn’s shoulder at the paper in her hands, “Oi!  What did I say about opening with a definition, you’re going to be writing essays for college soon...”

Buffy is left standing by the door, disconnected and jangling, like she’s in the wrong house, somehow, even though it’s hers.  She closes the door and puts one foot on the stair, before reminding herself that she said she’d watch Spike and Sarah, for Dawn’s sake.  So she moves into the kitchen, makes herself a cup of hot tea, and goes back into the living room.  Sarah and Dawn are sitting on the couch; Sarah has reclaimed the essay from Spike and is poring over it.  Spike sits in one of the overstuffed chairs facing them, arms folded, looking like he’s pouting; but the curve at his lip shows he’s actually amused, maybe even proud.  That leaves only one chair, the one next to his.

Buffy settles in with her tea.

Over the next half-hour, Dawn revises her essay on Spike’s recommendations, with Sarah interjecting feedback that’s pretty clever, too.  From the way Sarah keeps shooting Buffy satisfied looks, she’s showing off a little, maybe.

Then, they move on to Dawn’s geography homework, and then they’re through that too, and Dawn suggests a movie—like without even asking Buffy, but whatever.

Spike stands and jerks his head towards the kitchen as the girls bicker over whether Legally Blonde or Far and Away is the better choice.  Buffy shakes her head up at him; she’s got to stick by Sarah; she promised to keep an eye.  So Spike gives her a half-shrug and issues an understanding quirk of his lips before disappearing.

Spike runs his fingers idly over the top of her shoulders when he returns and when she looks up in surprise, he presses a Diet Coke into her hands, and resumes his seat; he’s holding a mug of blood for himself.  The gesture is so homelike and so clearly thoughtless that it makes Buffy’s cheeks burn with shocked embarrassment at the intimacy.  It’s her drink; the Diet Coke is in the fridge for her, and Spike knows it, and knows she’s tethered to Sarah, and brought her favorite drink and pressed it into her hands without a word, and was this what it was like, before?  Was soulless Buffy getting Diet Cokes and evenings in with her vampires and her kid sis?  How was any of this supposed to work?

Dawn cues up Dave, their compromise pick, and Spike comes around to the couch to squish in beside the girls. The couch is technically an oversized loveseat with two big cushions, but Spike beckons Buffy forward anyway.  He’s still not paying her much mind, eyes on the screen.

“C’mon, Slayer,” he says, “you won’t be able to see, from there.”

So she approaches and perches next to Dawn, vowing to remain vigilant, but she already knows her promise won’t last past the first fifteen minutes.  At first Sarah and Dawn can’t stop commenting and ribbing each other, but after the first hour, Dawn has slumped into Buffy’s side, and Sarah has melted into Spike, alternating sips from his cup of blood, and suddenly there are tears in Buffy’s eyes and she isn’t sure why.

Dawn doesn’t notice, but both Spike and Sarah look up sharply—just her luck tears probably have a smell or something—and she shakes her head, trying to be all no reason to get into it now, instead of I’m not sure what's happening, but Sarah scoots tentatively closer, watching Buffy’s face.  When Buffy doesn’t frown and keeps wiping at her eyes, Sarah leans her head on Buffy’s other shoulder without breaking eye contact, and snakes an arm behind her back.

Buffy presses her face into Sarah’s short-cropped hair immediately.  It’s very soft, and smells like shampoo plus, now that she’s super-close, faint traces of Spike’s cigarettes.  Dawn’s cottoned on to something being wrong, now, and wriggles closer on Buffy’s other side and now she’s pleasantly squished, already overwarm on the Dawn-side of her body and already feeling better.

“And here I thought this was s’pposed to be a comedy,” Spike says, and Buffy snorts and the girls are giggling and then it’s mysteriously all right again—for the next hour, anyway.

Dawn packs up her school things, Spike rinses out his mug, and Buffy accepts that, no matter what her training says, Sarah is going to be okay around Dawn for the foreseeable future.  Buffy’ll hang out in the house when they’re together, just to be sure they don’t get up to the any normal teen girls shenanigans, like prank calling, drinking too much, stealing one of Willow’s spellbooks, or whatever—but she has this weird impression that Sarah and Dawn are good influences on each other, way more than Dawn and Janice, who always seem to get into big trouble when they hang out.

Sarah makes her goodbyes, which includes hugs for Dawn and for Buffy, again, and skips outside into the nighttime air—she's probably just really waking up, getting energetic.  But Spike lingers in the doorway, that cracked-open expression on his face and Dawn, probably sensing an Important Conversation, joins Sarah in the dark to get an extra five minutes of giggling together.

“Well.  Goodnight,” Buffy says, bracingly.  “Um.  Thank you for helping Dawnie with her schoolwork.”

“Yeah,” Spike mutters.  “Of course.  No problem.”  And he takes this little half-step forward, like he maybe might—

“I don’twantyoutokissme,” Buffy blurts.

Spike freezes on the approach.  “Course not,” he murmurs gently, and wraps his arms around her, like they do this—like they’re hugging friends.

Only, it seems like they are hugging friends, because while Buffy’s thoughts are gibbering something about how Buffy should be pushing him away, possibly followed by punching his lights out, Buffy’s body is relaxing into Spike’s.  Buffy’s lungs are breathing out this little sigh, and her cheek is doing something against Spike’s chest that can only be called nestling.  If she had been pressed to describe how Spike might hug—a ridiculous premise on the face of it—she'd have thought he’d be grasping, groping.  But instead, the embrace is bone-meltingly perfect: arms tight and supportive around her, just strong enough to feel she’s being held and not enough to feel confined.  He’s just taller enough that it’s easy to tilt herself down to his shoulder, easy for him to hold her up.

She draws away when it feels natural, and her shock must show, because Spike gives her this kind of crooked, almost apologetic smile in reply.

“I was the first person you came across, after Dawn,” he explains softly.  “Reckon you imprinted a bit.  Don’t read too much into it,” he adds, and it should sound like a rejection—because it is—but his voice remains so quiet, so thoughtful that it’s clear he's trying to spare, not hurt, her feelings.

“Um.  Okay,” Buffy says softly in return.  “Thanks for.  Not being weirded out.”

A hint of the Spike she remembers kindles on his face in the form of a salacious smirk, a flash of eyetooth.  “Oh, Slayer, you can put your hands on me anytime,” he adds, then whirls in place, duster flaring, before joining Sarah and Dawnie on the front walk, leaving a flushed Buffy behind him.

After that, Buffy begins to wonder.  Willow’s insane schedule makes it challenging, but she finally manages to corner the redhead alone as she comes home from the Espresso Pump one night.  “Hey,” Willow says, dumping her keys into one of Joyce’s little decorative bowls near the door, alongside Buffy’s and Tara’s.  “How’s my favorite Slayer?”

“Good.  Good,” Buffy says, and she isn’t lying, really.  Her body feels great.  Her brain is still a little sludgy but she’s recovering.  “Hey, can I talk to you?”

“Yuh oh.  Words from which good things have never ever come.  Hang on and let me reheat some dinner and we can chat.”

So Buffy follows her into the kitchen where she reheats a little leftover casserole, scooping it up with tortilla chips: the perfect California meal.

Buffy has planned out what she’s going to say, but it all seems to fall out of her brain now that she’s faced with Willow, every question facile and meaningless.  “What was I like?” she finally says.

Willow nods, as if this was the exact kind of question she was expecting, and it loosens Buffy’s shoulders a little.  “Like you’d read about your life in a book—” and here she squinches her nose— “skimming some of the boring or annoying parts.”  When Buffy only continues to stare, Willow scoops some casserole on the end of her tortilla chip and munches thoughtfully.  “You hit all the high points of Being Buffy Summers.  Solid, B- work,” she adds. 

Willow waves the hand that isn’t carrying a load-bearing tortilla.  “You didn’t understand what made people embarrassed, and not much embarrassed you.  And it seemed like some, uh, biases were just poof!  Gone.  Like vampires, obviously.  You didn’t remember Riley at all, until we jogged your memory.  And you really liked hanging around Spike.”

For some reason, Buffy hears, but Willow doesn’t say that part aloud, and after an instant, Buffy realizes she was anticipating a look of disgust, too, that isn’t there.  “And you guys were okay with that?”

Willow eyes her for a moment, then drops her gaze to her bowl again.  “It was fine,” she opines, scooping up a chip’s worth of casserole and devoting her whole attention to it.  She tilts her head to one side and then the other, as if sifting through her thoughts.  “Me and Spike get along.”

Buffy blinks at her.  What an astonishing thing to say.  Her sweet, gentle friend and the undead next door?  “You’re… still dating Tara, right?”

Willow snorts.  “Yeah, Buffy, I’m not about to jump Spike’s bones.  Though if there ever was a guy who’d make a girl consider switching sides—"

“Do I hear my name?”  Spike sweeps through the front door with Dawn in tow; his hand’s resting atop her head, half-steering her; Dawn is putting up with it with good grace.

Buffy pinks, but Willow answers easily.

“Oh, I was just saying that if I were to do any guy, it’d be you,” she says, eyes sparkling with mischief and tongue tucked between her teeth.

This actually gives Spike an instant’s pause; Buffy sees a few expressions flash across his features, and Spike’s always been imminently readable but now it’s like he’s speaking aloud in a voice only Buffy can hear.  He’s purely shocked at first, then wary: is he being mocked?  And then troubled—what if she does mean it?  And then finally a lascivious smirk creeps across his face and he leans over Willow’s shoulder to whisper, “wouldn't have to switch sides, Red.  There are spells for that,” before whirling in a circle away from her, where he moves to grab some blood from the fridge.

Willow’s face has gone cherry red, but she’s still grinning up at him.  “When’s your birthday?” she teases, and Spike laughs.

“Where’s Sarah?” Buffy asks, if only to move the subject to something she understands.

“Oh, she’s with Clem,” Spike explains.  “Great vampsitter, Clem, and Sarah’s taken quite a shine.”

“She’s a little lonesome,” Dawn says solemnly, weaving expertly around Spike to withdraw more casserole from the fridge and scoop a little into a bowl for herself.  “We should have her by more often.”

Buffy looks up at Willow, but no help there.  The redhead’s busy eating, and only looks up once she realizes there’s a lull in the conversation.  “Oh, uh,” she said, looking to Spike and Dawn, “that sounds like a good idea, Dawnie.  What about dinners?  I know it’s a little catch-as-catch-can, as they say, but we could try and set something up regular-like on Fridays?  None of us have evening classes on Fridays.”

“‘Cause that’d be torture,” Spike agrees.

“Buffy?” Willow prods, and Buffy realizes that, as the owner of the house, she’s required to say something.

“Yeah.  Good, sure,” she says.  Her cheeks still feel hot.

“Gosh, I’m so wiped,” Willow sighs.  “I can’t wait to see the back of this semester.  I think I overdid it.”

“Well, you didn’t know you’d be Espresso Pumpin’ it,” Dawn says, then squinches her nose.  “However that came out is not how I meant it.”

“Okay, enough doubling your entendres,” Spike orders.  “You’re too little of a bit, yet.”

Willow tilts her head.  “Be fair, that was barely a tendre-and-a-half. She can’t afford a double.”

“I’ll save up,” Dawn promises, stealing a handful of chips from Willow.  “I got homework,” she says, disappearing upstairs with her bowl.

Spike stares after her.  “Talkin’ to that boy, whassisface—”

“Brandon?” says Willow.

“—Brandon on the phone, s’more like,” Spike finishes without missing a beat.

“She better use those flashcards I made for her chem tomorrow,” Willow says.

“Well then, she can’t avoid the A,” Spike says.  He turns towards Buffy.  “You eat, pet?”

Buffy looks up, blinking.  Spike is curled towards her and is looking solemnly into her face.

“I, uh—huh?”

“That’s a no,” Spike says, and then he’s moving towards the fridge.  “Three meals a day, remember,” he says, and then she hears him stop for a beat, behind her.  “Sorry.  ‘Course you don’t remember.  Were getting used to having a body, and kept forgetting to eat.”

Buffy isn’t sure what to say.  “You’d remind me,” she checks.

“All of us,” Willow elaborates.  “I mean, who live here. Dawn kept making you eggs.  Tara just used to drop a piece of fruit in your hand.  You’d stare at it a second, and then something’d click and you’d get this excited look on your face—”

“That good thing about being human face,” Spike interjects.

“And then you’d eat it to the pit,” Willow says with a grin.

Buffy feels the smile fall off her own face.  “Kind of wish I could remember being soulless.  Is that weird?”

Willow pulls a sympathetic face.  “No, Buffy,” she says.  “I’m still so sorry, you know.”

Buffy isn’t sure what to say about that, either.  She doesn’t remember any of it—well, most of it, beyond a few little bits that have somehow stuck, like enjoying Spike-hugs and forgetting to eat.  She doesn’t like to think about Willow screwing up, because then she’d have to think what it must’ve been like for someone with all her memories to just… disappear.  To know it was coming.

She’s waited too long, apparently, because Willow slumps a little, then goes to wash her empty bowl.  Spike reaches around Buffy and puts a plate on the counter behind her.  She’s been peripherally aware of him moving around in the kitchen, of course she has—she’s the Slayer and he’s a vampire—but somehow she still is surprised to be faced with all this tiny, easy-to-eat food: a cut-up apple, a little bowl of cashews, another little bowl of hummus.  For the chips, she guesses.  She looks up in surprise only to meet Spike’s hand on its way to the top of her head; as a result, his cool hand lands on her forehead, like he’s checking for fever.

He laughs and drags his hand back, sorting the sides of her hair out of her eyes again.

“I’ll just… go, now,” Willow says when Buffy squeaks faintly.

“Mmph?” Buffy says, but she isn’t sure she’s pleased Willow is sneaking away, or worried.

“C’mon, let’s go sit a spell,” he murmurs, and reaches for her shoulder, then pauses, twitches back.

It’s possible he thought she wouldn’t like it, but she liked the hug. 

Maybe he’s afraid she’s still so messed up from being resouled that she might not protest even though she’d want to, if she were back to herself.

Should she?  Protest?

Maybe.

Probably.

He’s a vampire, though.  He may not get that this is weird at all, the way he keeps touching her.  The way she wishes he’d do it more.

He’s asking Dawn to get some things to fix up her hands, and then she’s settling down onto the couch, and he’s perched on the coffeetable across from her.  He finds his courage, or else he can’t navigate around the shoals of necessity, because he’s suddenly clasping her hands.

Oh, she thinks, looking down.  Spike’s hands are cold, but his grip is firm.  The pressure feels foreign, but also nice: grounding. 

She thinks she remembers this.

Her mouth moves, but nothing comes out.

She sits back on the couch, just like she did in that snatch of memory, there then gone like a faint tune on the air.

“What’s that, pet?” Spike murmurs, setting the plate in front of her.

Buffy’s almost mad; he sat in front of her last time, she’s sure of it.  “You bandaged my hands,” she manages.

Spike’s gaze flares.  “Oh, pidgeon,” he murmurs, soft.  “Yeah, that’s right.  What a thing to remember.”

She looks up at his empathetic gaze.  “But it wasn’t bad at all.”  She’d felt puzzled, but safe and cared-for, Dawn and Spike in reach.  She frowns to herself, remembering, “everything was so loud and bright.  You and Dawn were quiet.  I was… grateful.”  Grateful isn’t the right word.  “I was…”  Reassured.  Relieved.  “Glad you and Dawn were there.”

“Here, eat a little,” Spike urges her, and she takes up a piece of apple and crunches it between her teeth.

The sharp sweetness flooded her mouth and suddenly she’s accepting a green-gold apple from Tara’s hand and chomping into it, the sensation sharp against her teeth, her tongue, new and glorious, and she can suddenly recall going apple-picking with her mother…

Buffy’s eyes prickle, and then she can remember giving Sarah her white hoodie, pulling her arms through the holes like her mother had for her…

And then it’s a flood, a deluge.  Buffy curls over her stomach as memory after memory comes flying home to land in her head, her chest.  Someone is saying something.  Someone is calling her name, urgent and low.  Buffy, Buffy, oh god, no. 

Buffy shudders and opens her eyes.

She hadn’t realized she’d closed them.

Her fingernails have dug soft little crescents into the skin of her palms, but there’s no blood.  There wasn’t time to clench hard enough.  Buffy blinks at Spike and sits up, feeling torn in two.  She’d been dating Spike.  Some version of her.  And he’d been sweet to her, and good to her friends, and she just, she just wants it to be like it was, with a sudden, shattering ache.

“Buffy?  Slayer?” Spike is whispering.  He’s crouched on the floor by the side of the couch.  His eyes are wild and very blue.

“I’m, I.”  Funny that’s the first thing I say, she thinks.  I, I’m what, exactly?  Who?  “I remember.”

“Oh,” Spike says, then straightens, even from his position of collapse beside her.  “Well, if you want to pop me one, you’ve every right,” he blusters.  “Way you see it, I might’ve taken a bit of advantage of, of y’r compromised state.  But hand to the devil, Slayer, I didn’t mean it.  I thought it was you, I swear I did.  Harris told me to watch myself, and I did, but you kissed me, and I wasn’t strong enough to deny you.  Just…”  His face contorts with agony.  “Don’t keep me from Dawn.  Please.”

None of that makes any sense at all.

“…Buffy?”

Where to begin?  “I’m not hitting you,” she says firmly. 

He shifts on his knees.  “Oh,” he says, slowly.

Where to, next?  Buffy thinks of the way Spike scooped her out of that circle, even as it burned him, the way he’d driven her and Dawn far, far away.  There are no words she can summon.  Except… “I think I love you.”

Spike’s eyes go impossibly wide.  “Now, pet,” he says, schooling himself.  “Just—just think a minute—”  And his face collapses again, a condemned building.  “You remember loving me, it—it ain’t the same.  Please don’t say that if you don’t mean it, Buffy.”

“Memory is a lot,” she says quietly, and Spike’s features ripple with grief.

“Oh, god,” he whispers, rises up at the knee like a wave crashing against the rocks, and kisses her.

Buffy remembers but oh.  The press of his lips, soft to hers.  Careful, salted like tears—no, like blood, he’s been drinking and it doesn’t even disgust her like it should.  Spikes flicker behind her closed eyes: Spike, tentatively taking her hands in his.  Spike, illuminated by the whiteness of her wings in his crypt; Spike, brushing the gravedirt off Sarah’s shoulders and ruffling through her hair; Spike, standing beside Xander and Willow and facing off against Giles’s disapproval; Spike behind the wheel of Xander’s van, occasionally glancing over at Buffy in the passenger side and going all startled and worshipful, like he had no idea how he’d managed to catch and keep her. 

And all the while, his lips are moving gently, softly against hers: so sweet, so gentle.  She pulls back, only then realizing one of her hands had risen to cup his cheek.

“You don’t have to be so careful, you know,” she says.

A grin.  “You were so sensitive, before.  Wouldn’t have enjoyed it if I pushed.” 

Spike takes instruction well, though.  He climbs to his feet, then presses Buffy back into the couch, settling with his knees on either side of her.  One hand cups the back of her neck as he returns his mouth to hers, pressing his advantage, and Buffy could possibly die on the spot, only that part’s getting kind of old.

She thinks she might like to live, this time.

Chapter Text

Buffy’s sleepily stirring her coffee with one hand.  She thinks it’s time to get serious about looking for a day job.  She remembers Anya’s admonitions, now: even with her salary from the Watcher’s Council, she may be playing catch-up for awhile.  Willow comes down a few minutes later with Tara, and they’re all sleepily clattering around the kitchen when the door bursts open with Spike under his usual smoking blanket, only when he throws it off, he—

Tara claps both hands to her mouth, and Willow turns beet red.

“I didn’t do it!” she exclaims.

Spike stomps towards her.  “You bloody well did, you… you absolute maniac!” he shouts, only his voice is half an octave higher, and his blue eyes are bluer (because they’re bigger?) and—well, he might be the loveliest woman Buffy’s ever seen.

“Ohhhhhmygod,” Tara slurs, incredulous.  Two spots of color have popped up on her cheeks.

“I didn’t mean to do it?” Willow offers.  Then, almost as a kind of offering: “Also, Spike, have you seen yourself?”

“Only when I looked down and saw I had… these!” Spike shouts, gesturing obscenely to his chest, where… Buffy has been trying not to look, because there is obviously no bra where there definitely should be, and it’s rude to stare.  He’s still in his leather duster and black tee shirt, and the whole effect is…

Is…

Buffy feels her own face heat.

“Oh,” Spike says, looking at each of them in turn.  “…Oh?”

The door opens again, and Spike darts away just in time enough to avoid being seared.

“Spike!” says Xander.  “What are you doing here so early in the ohhhhmygod.”

Spike crosses his arms under his new breasts, looking unimpressed.

Xander turns to the ladies helplessly.  “Gah?” he queries.

Willow has moved from embarrassment to distress.  “What, I’m doing magic in my sleep now?”

“You were dreaming about this?” Spike demands.  His mouth is open and his eyes are sparking, torn between incredulity, horror, and delight.  He ducks his head and gazes up at Willow from under his lashes.  “You were dreaming—"

Tara folds her arms.  “You were dreaming about this?”

The door opens a third time, and Giles enters.  “Hello, Buffy, everyone, I just wanted to say… well,” he adds, on catching sight of Spike.

And then nothing at all.

“There’s got to be a general reversal spell,” Willow says faintly.

“Oh.  Yeah,” Spike says.  “We need that root, what was it, Slayer?  General reversal, we were gonna do it for the Will-Be-Done thing.”

“Oh!” Buffy exclaims.  “That’s right!  We might… still have those ingredients, right Will?”

“Right,” Willow says, and scrambles upstairs, leaving Tara behind.

Buffy darts a nervous glance at her, but Tara seems to have both feet firmly planted in the land of the wryly amused.  “It’s a very good look for you, Spike,” she says, arms still folded.

“Guh,” Xander contributes.

“Willow!” Giles calls up the stairs.  “As amusing as it is for your psychosexual manifestations to be… manifesting, do you think you could, I don’t know, hurry it up?”

“Oh, am I making you… uncomfortable?” Spike murmurs, and gives a go at batting his eyes.

It’s devastating.

“Oh, god, put that away!” Xander shrieks, waving his hands.

Tara leans towards Buffy.  “I think I’m actually gayer, now,” she says under her breath.

Buffy gives a little nod.  She herself may actually be gayer than she was a few minutes ago.

“Okay, okay.  Sorry!” Willow’s saying as she clatters down the stairs.  She makes a little gris-gris and then burns it with the lighter in her other hand, and Spike is standing there back in his original everything, tugging his shirt and trousers as he grew into them a bit funny.  As Buffy watches, he sucks in his stomach and undoes his belt, shifting it wider a few notches before lacing the tongue through the metal again and breathing out. 

“Red,” he says, reaching for her.  She flinches, but he only holds both her shoulders and shakes a little.  “Ask.  First.”

“Oh.  Oh?” she says, and turns fire engine red.  Then, she slumps.  “I really didn’t mean to.”

“Well, before any more of your subconscious desires manifest,” Giles says, “you may want to give this a read.”  He draws a letter from his pocket.  “An invitation to study with a coven in Devon under a Ms. Harkness I know.”  He passes the letter to Willow.  “Best do it before you get someone killed.  Or unkilled… as the case may be.”

Buffy winces.  She remembers, now, how glad Giles was to see her.  It makes a warmth kindle in her chest.

But she also knows he’d thrown her back like a too-small fish when she wasn’t just what he’d expected.

Part of her does understand: to him, she hadn’t been Buffy.  She’d been an imposter.  She remembers that he’d suggested killing Dawn, and why.  This was the same, really.  Not to mention that he’s never been able to accept Spike, since he isn’t quite human.

“Wouldn’t believe how they mess with y’r balance,” Spike is muttering to Xander as Willow reads the letter with Tara peering over her shoulder, the redhead murmuring the words to herself.

“Oh, they weren’t that big,” Xander protests.

“Doesn’t matter!  Kept feeling I was gonna tip forwards—”

“C-cup at most—”

“Oh, were you lookin’?” Spike says, delighted with himself.  “Liked the cut of my jib, did you, Harris?”

“Oh, please.”

“Oh, are you too manly to admit you were—?”

“You know you’re gorgeous.”

This brings Spike up short.  “Oh, uh—” he says.

“I’d have to move to England,” Willow says.  She looks up at Giles.  “Could I finish my schooling there?”

“Keep reading,” Giles says.

“Like, present tense?” Spike says tentatively.  “That was present tense.”

“Oh.  Well,” Xander temporizes.

“But what about Tara?” Willow says weakly, turning to the other girl.  “Baby, I couldn’t just leave you behind…!”

“I mean,” Xander says, eyeing Spike.  “I mean… what are we talking about?”

“If you’d,” Spike says, and makes an obscene thrust with his hips.

“NO,” Buffy corrects, voice much louder than she’d heard it in her head.  “I’m seeing Spike.  So… literally all the rest of you can keep your hands to yourselves!”

“Oh,” says Spike, wicked glee draining away to be replaced with that beautiful, awestruck expression of his.  Still, a little leftover puckery makes him say, “sorry, baby, we hadn’t talked about making it exclusive,” but when Buffy darts her gaze over to him, he makes a small sound like a kicked dog and shuffles his feet.

Buffy can hear movement upstairs: Dawn getting ready for school.

Right, that’d be why Xander’s here.  It’s a schoolday.  A normal schoolday in the normal, Summers household.

“Dating, you’re… dating,” Tara repeats.

Oh, god.

Buffy’s said it.

Aloud.

In a room full of all her friends.

The awe is pulling from Spike’s face, like a rug out from under him, the longer Buffy stays quiet.  She reads him like a book, still, and she sees what he thinks and she can’t let this happen.

“I remembered everything,” she says sharply.

“You… what?  How?” Giles murmurs.

Buffy rolls her eyes, folds her arms.  “If the soul leaves the body when someone dies, Giles, but the memories remain intact, then memories aren’t attached to the soul.  They’re attached to the body.  Whatever heavenly creature made her home in my body, I know what she knows, and I experienced what she experienced.  I remember… Spike,” she explains, petering out.

Giles’s face looks commiserating.  “Buffy,” he says, gently.  “Just because you… promised things to Spike when you were… not yourself…”

Xander shuffles on his feet; Spike nudges him with his shoulder.

She’s really glad she can remember, now, how Xander stood up for him.

For all of them.

It gives her the strength to say what she needs to say, next.

“Giles,” she says, mirroring his careful voice.  “Dawnie’s my sister, my real sister and she always will be—because I decided that.  I made up my mind to love her.”

And some sixth sense makes Buffy look up to see that Dawn has emerged from her room just in time to hear her, and watch Dawn sink down to sit at the top step, eyes wet.

“And Spike’s been good to us,” she goes on.  “Looking after Dawn, looking after me.  Looking after Sarah.  The only thing that kept me from him was that he didn’t have a soul, because… well, everyone knows why.  But then I didn’t have one, and I still wanted to be good; it’s just that I mostly didn’t care what other people thought, I guess.”

Because that other-her would be more baffled than anything else, all of course I love Dawnie and of course I adore Spike; she wouldn’t have even known why her friends might not have understood, and she really wouldn’t have cared about pleasing them, or fitting in—not in the way Buffy herself newly did.  Her heart is pounding at defying Giles, her palms clammy.  She feels like she’s running a low-grade fever as she denounces what she’s been taught in a room full of everyone she cares about.

And she thinks, that’s it.  Vampires don’t care what anybody else thinks, even a little, and they need blood to survive; it should be easy to just take what you need if your brain works like that.  But a few vampires, like Spike, and Sarah—they must really want to be good, not just be afraid of the consequences: not fitting in, or getting caught, or stared at.  They must want to be good for good’s sake.

In which case, Spike is kind of a marvel.

She struggles to remember her place, her point, because this line of thinking has lifted her train of thought right off the tracks.  “And I was a person, before,” she says, and this part is hardest.  “I was a person with all of Buffy Summers’ memories and you… you killed that person, Giles.  You did it for this version of me, but… do you even know you killed a person?  Or is it okay because I was like Dawn, I was like Spike—I wasn’t real, to you?”

“Buffy, no,” Giles murmurs, reaching for her.

She takes a sliding step back.

It isn’t an admonition.

She didn’t tell her body to do that.

And, as if her wariness is a tuning fork struck and eliciting sympathetic vibrations in similar instruments, the others cluster around her immediately, and Giles is left staring at a Slayer, a vampire, two witches, and the ordinary Good Man who threw him out of this house a few weeks ago.  And then Dawn darts downstairs and throws her arms around Buffy’s waist and they’ve got the full set.

“You weren’t real,” Giles swears, hands twitching at his sides, like he’d like to press one to Buffy’s shoulder and knows it wouldn’t be welcome.  “Whatever those memories are telling you, I know my—I know you,” he says, helplessly.  “It wasn’t you.”

“It was some kinda me, I think,” Buffy insists.  “And she knew you well enough to feel betrayed."

Giles blanches.

"You overwrote me like a corrupted file," Buffy says, just to be sure he understands.  “You did something bad as Willow.  Worse, because you knew you were doing it.”

His face crumples, and he removes his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose.  “I couldn’t—you couldn’t be gone still,” he says, and Buffy thinks they’ve finally drilled down to the problem.  The problem Giles and Willow share. 

“Maybe,” Buffy says, “you might want a refresher course.  With Ms. Harkness?”

Giles looks up and stares at her.  His eyes are bright.  “Are you… are you telling me I need to train? To learn control?”

“Oh, how the turntables,” Xander mumbles, and Spike elbows him again.

“Maybe,” Buffy says.  “Because, Giles, the world is a lot more complicated than white hats and black hats. My friends are gonna include demons, and my boyfriends are gonna be vampires sometimes, and my sister is a magical ball of energy.  Get used to it.”

“Boyfriends, plural?” Spike says.  “I don’t like being put in the same bucket as Mr. Broody, Slayer—”

“Hush,” Buffy says, but her hand finds his.  “Giles, you killed a version of me just a few months after I died saving the world.  I really think you need to talk to somebody.”  The waves of heat and cold have gotten worse, now, at this extremely direct suggestion, but Buffy soldiers through.  “Please, for me.”

Giles tilts his head to the side.  “I don’t see why—if I go with Willow—I couldn’t, well—a few weeks—”

She has no trouble decoding that.  “That’s good,” she says, firmly.  “Isn’t that good?”

“That’s very good,” Tara agrees immediately, and something in Buffy uncurls dramatically at this hint of approval from her social group.

She may actually miss not having a soul.

“Group therapy!” Willow enthuses.  “You and me, buddy, partners in unethical crimes!  We’re gonna learn so much, together, don’t you think?”

A ghost of a smile appears on Giles’s lips.  “Oh, joy.”  But Buffy, looking at him, thinks the pleasure is genuine, and she thinks she sees—a hint of relief?  Buffy remembers, suddenly, his voice on the phone, choked with tears—and now he’s going to have time to sort himself out.  “But really, Buffy,” he says in this very ordinary, Gilesian, longsuffering voice.  “Spike?”

“Mm?  Present,” Spike says.

Buffy grins.  “Yes, Giles.”  She looks at Spike.  “I’m sure I have that skull ring somewhere…”

Spike turns a look of incandescent happiness on her: a mix of surprise, delight, and his usual wickedness.  He leans in and kisses her with Dawn’s arms still loose around her waist.

Giles mutters something about the smacking, but when Buffy pulls away, he still looks more relieved than anything else.

“Okay, well—school is still a thing that’s happening,” Xander reminds them.

“Oh!  My flashcards!” Dawn shouts, and thunders back up the stairs.

“Class in—” Tara’s saying.

“I have to pack!” Willow yipes, and in less than a minute, it’s just Buffy and Spike and Xander and Giles, standing awkwardly in the foyer.

“If you’re sure about this, Buffy,” Giles says.

She’s sure, dead or living, no one has ever looked at her like Spike is looking at her, now.  “Yeah, actually,” she says carelessly, slinging an arm around Spike’s waist.

It turns out, even Spike has his duties.  “I’ve got to get back to Sarah, I left in a hurry in account of all the—”  He makes a gesture at his now-flat chest that is nonetheless eloquent.

Buffy rolls her eyes.

“You’ll check in about the—thing?” Spike says to Xander, who nods, and they actually shake hands like goddamned adults.

Spike tosses his jacket over his head and runs for the sewers.  Buffy is a little embarrassed by him, she thinks, but also, still: yep. 

In soppy, unapologetic love.

“What was that all about?” she queries of Xander after the three of them have stared off at Spike’s retreating dark figure, absurdly dramatic in the morning sunshine.

“Oh, he wants a job,” Xander says.  “I did some temporary framing in his crypt, to give him and Sarah some separate spaces, but it’s not forever.  Construction’s mostly a day job but not always.  I said I’d ask around.”

Dawn comes rattling back downstairs, kisses Buffy on the cheek and then jogs out to Xander’s van; the other man follows.

“Buffy,” Giles says.

Buffy turns, folds her arms, raises one eyebrow.

“May I?” he queries.

Buffy jerks a nod and opens her arms.

“I do love you, too, you know,” he says into her hair.  “For all the times I’ve made you doubt it, I am heartily sorry.”

“I know,” she says, lips mashed against his sweater.  “Um.  Have I?  Ever made you doubt it?”

Giles pulls back, holds her by the shoulders, issues a pained little laugh.  “Not for so much as a second, Buffy.”

“Oh,” she says.  “Well.  That’s good.  I’m glad.”

He tilts his head at her, and his face does something rueful and warm and complicated.  “Buffy,” he says, cupping her cheek with one hand.  “I’m baffled by your choices, but I think I am also very proud.”

“That’s how you know you’re a real dad,” Buffy says.

Disinhibition strikes again.

She wonders if that’s ever going away, or if it’s a little gift from that other version of herself, a spiritual hangover.

She frowns, wondering what might happen if she tries to lie.

“I hate you very much,” she tries, but it comes out just fine.

“And that’s how you know you’re a real daughter, I suppose,” Giles says, laughs, and kisses her on the forehead.  “Because I do believe you love me, too.”