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Buffy stands in front of the gravestone, shivering lightly in the late night air.
BELOVED SISTER, DEVOTED FRIEND. If she is being honest, she much prefers the girl described on the gravestone to the one sitting across from it. The one who has increasingly angry, absent Dawn to contend with. The one who hadn’t noticed that her best friend was going through something horrible.
SHE SAVED THE WORLD A LOT. It sounds almost laughable now. She reaches out absently to trace the letters, but a sharper, angrier impulse takes over and she punches at them instead. Her fist collides with stone with a satisfying smack. She hits the stone again and again, letting the pain in her hands overtake her and drown out any other feeling. After awhile, her knuckles hurt too much to continue and she switches to slamming into granite with the heels of her hands. It’s such a stupid thing to do— she’s supposed to be patrolling all week and there’s no way she can adequately defend herself with her hands all beat up— but it feels so, so good.
“Buffy? Hey, Buffy!” A voice calls to get her attention. Spike. She whirls around and she’s on him in a moment, a well-aimed kick making him lose his balance. Spike goes down and stays there. It takes her several more punches directly to his face and ribs to realize he isn’t retaliating.
“Why won’t you hit me back?” She screams out, aiming another kick at his abdomen. Please, she wants to add. Please do something to me. She looks down.
“I’m through being another way for you to hurt yourself. It isn’t fair.” Spike is sort of half-heartedly protecting his face, loosely curled up but not really defending himself. God, what is she doing? What’s wrong with her?
She stands there for a moment, breathing hard, trying to decide which direction to bolt in, when it hits her all at once. She crumples to the ground, hugging her knees to her chest and sobbing.
She completely forgets about the man next to her until she hears a low voice that makes her jump. “It’s okay. It’ll heal up. Always does.” Spike doesn’t sound bitter or angry at all. Somehow that’s worse.
She looks up blearily, not at him but at her grave. It’s even more of a perfect horror movie scene now, the ground still broken underneath and the gravestone cracked and dotted with blood.
“Let’s go to my crypt. I have a first aid kit there. Could get both of us sorted.”
Buffy wants, badly, to disagree. Should disagree, and leave him be, but the same impulse that landed her here, sitting in the dirt, has her terrified to be alone. “Okay.”
Spike holds out his arm to help her up, but she can’t bring herself to take it. She stands up on her own, clearing her throat and wiping dirt off her pants.
They make it to his front door, and he opens it and sits her down on the couch. Spike procures a mid-sized red box and sits down next to her. “Can I see?”
“I can do it myself.” Buffy’s voice sounds thin and far away even to her own ears.
“No you can’t. Not while they’re both that badly beat up. Come on.” She looks down. Until now, Buffy hadn’t noticed how bruised and bloody her hands were.
Reluctantly, she holds them out to him, and he takes one in his, achingly gentle. “Yeah, that’s gonna need some gauze. Did quite a number on yourself there.” He’s using the same careful voice he used when she was fresh out of the grave, as if she might shatter in front of him. The kindness hurts so much worse than any amount of anger or disgust he could hurl at her.
“This’ll sting a bit,” he warns, holding up the bottle of mercurochrome to show her. Good, she thinks, and it must show on her face somehow because Spike makes a pained expression and shakes his head. She barely winces as the drops hit the various cuts and scrapes, and she can’t even decide if the sting feels good or not.
He leans in more closely to bandage her hands. She is suddenly acutely aware of the lines on his face, the way his brow furrows in concentration as he works as slowly and gently as possible. “There,” he says, dropping them back into her lap. Without thinking about it, she leans in for a kiss.
Spike kisses back at first, but only briefly. He pulls back, lightly exasperated. “What do you want, Buffy?” It’s the first time his words have had any sharpness to them all evening. She knows she deserves it, but it still hurts.
To taste your blood on my lips, she thinks. She wonders, for the second time, what could possibly be so wrong with her. Maybe Spike was onto something and she really did come back wrong.
“I mean, you hit me twelve ways to next Sunday and now you want a make out sesh. You know I’m good for it any time, but not like this.” He really does sound hurt, she thinks. Maybe she should apologize, but she can’t make the words come out.
Aloud, she says “When do the nightmares stop?”
“What do you mean, love?” He’s got a crumpled paper towel over one eyebrow now, trying to stop the last of the bleeding. His voice is back to soft and gentle and concerned.
“You had to dig yourself out too, right? I keep waking up thinking I’m trapped in a box or something.” Really it isn’t even the half of it. There’s the constant feeling of suffocation, the need to escape even when she’s wide awake. The sense that everyone wants something from her that she can’t give them. The constant cloying guilt about feeling any of this at all.
Spike thinks for a moment. The silence stretches between them heavily before he speaks again. “I’m not really sure. I think being a soulless vampire probably helped. And I had Drusilla next to me most nights. That helped too. But it got better eventually. Got used to the whole being dead thing.” Spike pulls the paper towel away from his head to confirm the bleeding has stopped. “Course, you’ve got something a bit different going on.” Buffy doesn’t say anything in response. “You ever decide you need a break, you can come to me.” He starts speaking more haltingly. “I won’t… ask anything of you. Anyway, better than hurting yourself or— or pretending like everything’s fine.” He gets up. “Speaking of which. There’s Aspirin around here somewhere.”
Buffy shakes her head vigorously. “I don’t need it. It’s okay.”
“I know. But you’ll be glad of it in a couple hours, once you’ve had some rest.” He rummages around his crypt for a bit, coming up with a small bottle and shaking out two pills. “Here.” He crosses back over to Buffy and holds his hand out. Something about the way his brows knit together when he looks at her makes her stop protesting and take them. He grabs a water bottle from a case she hadn’t noticed and hands it to her, too.
She swallows the pills and drinks greedily, draining the bottle. “Wow, you’ve really swanked this place up. A couch and some water and everything. Didn’t think you had that many visitors.”
“Oh, Giles came by a few times when he had questions for me. And Tara came to check on me once or twice when you were, uh, gone.”
It occurs to her for the first time how lonely Spike must be. Maybe they do have that in common, at least. “Giles needed things from you?”
“Oh yeah. We had a regular operation going. Patrol schedule, research, everything. Dunno how you do it.”
“I don’t either.” She laughs bitterly. Something Spike said sticks in her head, though, about her hurting herself. “You know I would never do anything drastic, though, right? I mean, people need me.” Spike doesn’t answer. “Dawn— when I was standing back on the tower, Dawn begged me not to jump again. I couldn’t do that to her.”
“I know.”
“But—“ she hesitates a moment. It isn’t at all fair of her to say this. They wanted to rescue her. They couldn’t have known she was at peace.
“But what?”
Something in her breaks and she starts sobbing again. “I’m so tired.”
“I know, love.” He hesitates for a moment and then starts patting her back awkwardly. She moves into the touch and he gently pulls her into a hug, following her lead and giving her plenty of time to pull away. For once, she lets herself feel it all, the gentleness and the love he has for her.
“Spike?”
“Yeah?”
She pauses for a moment again, embarrassed at what she is about to ask. “Can I stay here tonight? I— I don’t want to go back home.”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Course you can. You can have the couch if that’s alright. Wait here one moment.” He extricates himself from her arms and walks across the room to grab a soft quilt. “Here.” He wraps it around her.
“Hey wait a minute. This is mine.”
“Uh… yeah.” Now it’s his turn to be embarrassed. “I took it from your house awhile back. Back when I thought you were gone for good. I thought if I could sleep with something that smells like you, it’d help.”
“Did it?”
“Not really,” he admits. “Um, you can have it back if you want.”
She pictures him wrapped in her old quilt, dreaming up different ways to save her each night. She is hit with a new pang of guilt for hitting him. “No, it’s okay. Keep it.” Another thought occurs to her. “Spike? What were you doing at my grave to begin with?”
“Had to make sure it was all real. That the earth was all dug up and I hadn’t dreamed that you were back. I’ve done it a couple times and it never seems to stick.”
God, she really isn’t allowed to give up, is she? For a moment she hates him all over again for caring about her, and thinks about fleeing. But she really is so tired, and the comforter is so soft. She lies down instead, full of promises to herself that she’ll leave first thing in the morning. “I’m here,” she says aloud.“I’m not going anywhere.” She tries to keep the bitterness out of her voice and isn’t quite sure if she succeeds.
”I know. I’m not going anywhere either. Go ahead and rest.”
She drifts off, for the first time in a long time, properly aware that she isn’t going to wake up in a box in the ground. Maybe, she thinks, this can become bearable.