Chapter One – Words of Wisdom

*~*

If there was one thing she knew, it was that Spike couldn't be trusted.  Punched, kicked, beaten to a bloody pulp, and heck, even dusted, but never, ever trusted.  Trusting Spike was tantamount to taking a cobra to bed and expecting to wake up alive in the morning.  Only an incredibly, no, ridiculously stupid individual would even consider placing the words Spike and trust in the same sentence without the buffering comfort zone of not or never or some other negative in between.  The mere idea was laughable, pure insanity.

And so , Buffy thought with no small amount of irritation, I am either incredibly insane or ridiculously stupid.  Perhaps both.

Yet the truth of the matter remained; somewhere in the span of the past few minutes, something inside her brain had undeniably shifted Spike toward the trust category.  Not unconditional trust; Spike may have proven himself today, but this trust in him was a new thing, something to be handled with care.  She couldn’t afford to throw all her faith into him blindly, but she knew now that she could count on him, at least as far as Dawn was concerned, and that was more than enough to induce one major wiggins – all the more significant for the fact that she hadn’t even used the word in years.

Her brain struggled to process this as she wandered, by rote, back toward the Magic Box.  Something niggled at the back of her mind, trying to call attention to itself, and she had the sneaky feeling that this elusive something had been patiently waiting for her to notice it for some time.  Was it a coincidence, then, that it should decide to take offense at being ignored at the precise moment she realized what Spike had done for her?  Buffy scoffed.  Of course it had something to do with Spike.  She’d learned over the years that such things rarely amounted to happenstance.

Her impending revelation had yet to coalesce into conceivable thought, though, and from experience, she knew she could not force it.  This something-I-already-know-but-haven’t-realized-yet had proven tenacious enough to draw her attention.  It would find its way out and she would have her epiphany, but in the meantime, she would have to resign herself to living with its whispering, intrusive, wake-me-from-a-dead-sleep-when-I-finally-figure-it-out presence.

She reached the Magic Box without remembering the journey.  The jingling of the bell at the doorway jarred her into full awareness, and she met the collective, anxious eyes of the assembled group, now minus one robot.  Buffy lingered in the doorway a moment, meeting their searching stares.

“So . . . ?”  Dawn’s question, tentative, fearful, broke the strained silence.

Buffy sighed.  “He didn’t tell.”

They came immediately to life with a flurry of words; expressions of doubt, declarations of relief, all loud and noisy and blurring together and making her head ache.  It had been a thoroughly exhausting day.  She so did not need this.

“Guys!” she shouted, voice as edgy as she could manage, cutting through the din of their chatter.  “He. Did. Not. Tell.”

Clearly, they wanted to start up again, but the look on her face – she was reasonably certain she was glowering at them – held them in check.  They faced each other in a standoff of sorts, until Buffy relented.  “Giles?”

The Watcher had his glasses off and one hand pinching the bridge of his nose.  “Are you certain, Buffy?  It’s imperative that we know for sure.”

Buffy slipped into the chair across from Giles.  “I’m sure,” she assured him, casting a glance toward the other members of the group, knowing her expression carried her confidence.  She had no doubts, and they needed to see that.

“So he . . . fell for the Bot thing?” Dawn asked.

“Yeah,” she replied.  “Didn’t realize it was me until . . . later.  But I saw when he did, and Spike’s not that good of an actor.” 

Tara and Dawn were nodding quietly, while Willow looked contemplative.  Xander hadn’t quite bought it yet, judging by his scowl of disbelief.  Giles merely looked inquisitive, cleaning his glasses slowly.

“When I . . . as the Bot . . . offered to go and tell Glory myself, he made it abundantly clear that she could never find out,” Buffy continued, recalling Spike’s adamant insistence that Dawn’s secret remain that way.  “Probably would have fallen off that sarcophagus and crawled after me . . . it . . . if I’d insisted.”

“I don’t get it,” Willow remarked, leaning up against the counter with her arms crossed over her chest.  “Why would he do that?  To let Glory torture him . . . even a vamp can only stand so much.”

“Gotta say, Buff, it doesn’t make much sense,” Xander agreed.

Buffy sighed and sent Xander a meaningful look.

He understood at once, and his expression of doubt shifted into the angry, offended one he affected whenever the topic of Spike loves Buffy came up.  “Oh don’t tell me you think it has something to do with this . . . obsession of his?”

She so did not want to deal with this, and sighed heavily.  “Knock it off, Xander.”

Xander set his hand on her arm.  “Buff-”

Buffy patted his hand and then slipped her arm away.  “Yeah, it’s about me,” she admitted, speaking quietly, feeling reluctant to both admit to knowing how Spike apparently felt, and to talking about it.  “Whatever I think about that doesn’t matter right now.”

Xander scoffed.  “I kinda think it does, Buffy.”

This earned him an eye-roll and a scowl.  “He did something pretty good today and I think he deserves a little credit for it,” she snapped, realizing that she had moved from merely reassuring them about Spike to defending him from them.  “So knock it off, please.”

Xander shook his head and started to open his mouth to continue, when Anya’s arm disappeared under the table and Xander’s face scrunched into an entirely different expression altogether.  Buffy quickly averted her eyes and silently thanked Anya for her inappropriate, if timely, interruption.

“She has a point,” Tara said, coming to stand beside Buffy, one corner of her mouth turned up in amusement.

Leave it to Tara to just accept the truth behind something, without letting others’ opinions or preconceived ideas get in the way.  Buffy appreciated the show of support, and she and Tara exchanged a brief smile.

Giles had replaced his glasses onto his face, and turned to look at Xander, who was now scowling at Anya instead of Buffy.  “As much as it pains me to say so, I-I have to agree.”

“Well, I knew he wouldn’t tell,” Dawn insisted, though Buffy knew she’d had her doubts as much as any of them.

“I’ll admit, I thought he would’ve,” Buffy added.  “Kinda throws me more than a little that he didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Xander muttered, “me too.”

Conversation fizzled then, and Buffy’s thoughts drifted back to the battered vampire, and a flash of concern flickered through her brain.  It brought her no little sense of unease to be feeling concern for Spike, but what he’d done for her today hadn’t been merely good, it was down right noble of him.  He deserved some concern.  He’d earned it.

While she pondered what all this meant, that niggling in her brain reminding her constantly of its presence, the others resumed conversation around her.  She tuned them out, aware of it but not its subject, staring off into space in the vague direction of the centre of the table. 

“Buffy?”

She snapped her gaze up toward Giles, who, judging by the look of distress on his face, had been trying to get her attention for some time.  “Sorry . . . just thinking.”

Giles repeated his offer to order them all some take-out, as it had been a long day and they were undoubtedly hungry as much as tired.  Buffy nodded unenthusiastically while the others piped in with their dinner preferences.  They settled on Chinese, and while Giles headed to the telephone to place the order, Buffy stood and wandered into the training room.

She felt the urge to hit something, inspired, no doubt, by the conflicting thoughts and feelings, all revolving around Spike.  Everything she had ever been taught about vampires, Spike had just thrown in her face, laughing all the way.  That Spike would allow Glory to torment him for so many hours, enduring the agony of torture and the humiliating loss of control, when he so easily could have given her the answers and walked away unscathed pointed to just how much the vampire had changed. 

And as her fist connected with the punching bag, realization exploded inside her brain.  She dropped her fists and the bag swung back, knocking her off-balance and sending her tumbling into the mat.

“Buffy?”

She felt her cheeks colour with embarrassment, realizing by the amused upturning of Giles’s mouth that he’d witnessed the punching bag getting the better of her.  She tore her thoughts away from the brink of her epiphany to smile wearily at her Watcher.  “Lucky shot?”

“Of course,” Giles replied, thankfully saying nothing more on the subject.  “It seems that after the incident involving the Erlach demon last month, the Chinese place will no longer make deliveries to the Magic Box.”

Rising to her feet, Buffy cringed at that unpleasant memory.

“So,” Giles continued, stepping toward her now.  “I have reluctantly agreed to hold this impromptu dinner party at my flat . . . if you’re interested in joining us.”

Suddenly, the idea of being alone with her thoughts left her eager for the company, and she nodded.  “Let’s go get us some of that eggrolly goodness.”

*~*

Visiting the robot in the Magic Box’s basement to exchange clothing for the second time was more than unsettling.  Looking into its dormant face with its vacant expression sent disturbing chills down her spine.  Despite what she’d said earlier, it was an exceptionally good copy.  Thinking of the things that Spike had done with it . . . well, she tried very hard not to go there.

It was with no small amount of relief that, while undressing her electronic doppelganger, she saw the precise mimicry did not extend to the areas normally covered by her clothing.  The many subtle differences offered her the comfort that at least Spike – and Warren, who had undoubtedly made the abomination – hadn’t completely invaded her privacy.  The bot’s nakedness was its own; it wasn’t hers.

Buffy wasn’t stupid.  She knew exactly why Spike had wanted this . . . thing .  What didn’t make sense, however, was the extra steps he had taken to give it personality . . . to make it her.   It had knowledge of her friends, Xander and Anya had seen it fighting vampires, and when Giles called out her name for help, the bot had abandoned its attempt to reach Spike and gone to him.  It believed it was Buffy, and it was in love with Spike.  Spike hadn’t created a Buffy-shaped thing to act on his twisted sexual fantasies.  He had tried to create Buffy .  A Buffy to love him, and yes, to participate in endlessly disturbing sexcapades – but he had wanted her , not just her body.  While the whole concept remained obscenely distressing, this small insight helped ease some of her concerns.

Her mind still reeled with the magnitude of her training-room brainwave.  Spike had changed.   Everything she knew about demons, about vampires, told her that it was impossible for them to change their nature, but Spike, ever the rebel, had irrefutably done so.  The chip helped; she suffered no disillusions over that fact.  It forced him to adapt his way of life, and adapt he had . . . but now that she thought about it, he had done so in startlingly unexpected ways.

Until recently, Spike shared his crypt with Harmony, and yet she couldn’t count the number of times she’d barged in to find him supping on cold pig’s blood.  He could have been feeding off Harmony’s victims, but experience told her that the night Drusilla returned to Sunnydale coincided with Spike’s first taste of human blood in more than a year.  Chances were this initially came about as a matter of pride – Spike was too proud a creature, too independent, to have to rely on the likes of Harmony for nourishment.  She had seen his shame, those weeks after his chipping, in admitting he needed help, from his enemies no less.  That something like pride could stand in the way of bloodlust – that he would willingly choose pig’s blood, the taste of which he did not precisely enjoy – it spoke of just how unique Spike truly was.

She remembered, too, the scene not long ago when Spike, tending to the comfort of an injured woman, looked up at her and told her that she need not worry; he would refrain from sampling the freely flowing offerings of Olaf the Troll God’s Bronze balcony victims.  She had considered the whole thing repulsive at the time, thinking it ridiculous that he should want credit for something so . . . disturbing.  He had told her he wouldn’t in order to earn him points, but what he hadn’t mentioned was the sheer willpower it must have taken him in order to do it.  The chip didn’t affect his bloodlust.  To any other vampire, the situation would have amounted to a free-for-all smorgasbord.  But not a taste for Spike.

Spike gathered no minions to do his evil bidding, something so basic Buffy wondered why she hadn’t before considered the possibility.  After the last abortive attempt to rid himself of the chip, he had actually been helpful .  Without even waiting behind to take credit for it, he had killed one of Glory’s Lei-ach demons, and proved Tara ’s ultimate humanity with a very pulled punch.  He’d suffered the headache and she’d been left without a mark.  He had protected her sister on more than one occasion, even before this latest Glory debacle.  The night he’d told Buffy about killing slayers, and she’d shoved him to the ground and tossed her handful of money at him as though he were nothing more than a lowly beggar, he put aside his rage and humiliation in the face of her anguish to offer comfort.  Comfort she had accepted.  Comfort she rejected only days later from Riley. 

That thought stalled her ponderings a moment, and she wondered, why did I accept it from Spike, but not Riley?

Because Riley wanted you to be helpless , whispered the second voice, still her own, playing devil’s advocate to herself.

I’m not helpless , Buffy protested, the insanity of arguing with herself so completely not lost on her.

And Spike accepts that you’re not .  

That, at least, was true.  Spike hadn’t offered his comfort in order to play the role of the man, the protector, to the distressed damsel.  He’d simply known that she needed it, with the underlying acknowledgement that one moment of unexpected but much-welcomed solace didn’t render her dependent or weak.

“Huh,” she remarked aloud, pulling her brown t-shirt over her head.  “Changed and insightful.”

This train of thought was becoming stranger by the moment, disconcerting in the manner of realizing something that truly felt better left unacknowledged, because the truth of it stung worse than the slowly disintegrating illusion.  The chip may have required Spike change his ways, but what he had done with that requirement astounded her, now that she recognized it.  The changes in Spike were phenomenal, and she hadn’t seen it, because despite the fact that he had always been a vampire, she had come to judge his actions based on her expectations of a human.  When she factored in his vampirism, the depth of what he had done, what he was doing , with his existence nearly took her breath away in the physical, completely un-clichéd sense.

So what does this mean? she asked herself.  It meant Spike was doing the impossible, and what that meant . . . God, I can’t even imagine.

*~*

She was trying really, really hard not to be all space-girl.  It was bad enough being tortured by her own thoughts; she didn’t need the others noticing her extreme bordering-on-brooding pensiveness.  She had hoped that digging eagerly into her dinner would provide enough of an excuse to cover for her lack of talkage.  Apparently, she’d failed to laugh at one or two obviously funny Xanderisms and missed enough conversational cues that they had noticed anyway.

“Earth to Buffy,” Xander taunted, waving chow mein laden chopsticks in front of her face.  “The cookie called and it’s missing its fortune.”

“That’s his way of telling you that you’re gaping off into space like the village idiot,” Anya clarified, nodding cheerfully.

At this, Buffy managed an indignant scowl.  “I am so not gaping!”

“As a matter of fact, Buffy, I rather think you’d be catching flies if your jaw were to drop any lower,” remarked Giles, grinning around a forkful of fried rice.

Traitorous Watchers.

Buffy fell heavily against the back of Giles’s couch, eyes rolling up toward the ceiling as she sighed softly.  “I don’t know . . . I guess I’m kinda distracted.”

“Thanks for the revelation, Captain Obvious,” Dawn teased.

“We had noticed,” added Tara , with a shrug and a hesitant smile.

“Yeah, and you completely missed Xan’s Howard the Duck joke,” Willow continued, refilling her plate with a generous helping of beef and broccoli.

Dawn nodded emphatically, as though this fact alone indicated just how far away she had been.  “Not even an eye roll or one of those crinkle-nose faces.”

“Hey, that joke’s a classic!” Xander protested.

Giles rolled his eyes this time.  “Yes, and about as inane as the cinematic brilliance which inspired it,” he drawled.

Xander waggled his chopsticks in Giles’s direction.  “You mock that which you don’t understand, Watcher Man.”

“I mock that which is absurd,” Giles corrected.  “Really, a giant talking duck?”

Buffy chuckled softly as Giles and Xander went on to discuss rather animatedly the various shortcomings of each other’s taste in movies.  With the focus away from her, Buffy felt her mind wandering again but didn’t bother to try to follow the conversation.  They already knew she was distracto-girl; why fight it?  The sooner she got to the end of this seemingly endless mental character study, the better.

Questions filled her thoughts now, one inner voice providing them, and the other whispering answers that she did not always like.  She had circled around some of them, her refusal to acknowledge the truth bringing her right back again.  Spike had changed, was continuing to change.  This she knew, accepted, no matter how bizarre the whole thing seemed.  But why?

Why is he changing?

Because he loves me . 

She hated that thought, rejected it, though the darker of her two inner voices – the one steadfastly refusing to play by her much-cherished rules of denial – kept returning to it with vehemence that shocked her.

Lighter Buffy protested.  He doesn’t love me.  It’s just . . . lust.

He loved Drusilla.  I know he did.  That was more than lust.

Vampires can’t love.  

Just like they can’t change?

The words robot and Buffy tugged her attentions back to the present, but not before she grudgingly acknowledged the significance of that final thought.

“. . . just in case it could be useful later,” Willow finished, glancing apologetically at Buffy.  “I know it’s kinda creepy . . . but . . . you never know.”

“Just as long as Spike doesn’t get his hands on it again,” Xander grumbled, rubbing at his temples.  “I mean, you guys didn’t see it . . . with the straddling and the—”

“Xander!”

He stopped short at the simultaneous protests from Buffy, Willow , and Giles, the latter of whom jumped up from his seat mumbling something about finding a spatula for the sweet-and-sour sauce and needing Dawn’s assistance.

“Whatever,” Dawn muttered, rolling her eyes with flourish while following the Watcher with clear reluctance.  “Let’s pretend that I don’t know anything about Spike’s Buffy-shaped sex robot.”

“It’s in here somewhere, I’m fairly certain!” Giles called, head popping into view through the cut-out in the kitchen wall.

Xander glanced over his shoulder at Dawn’s retreating back, then leaned in conspiratorially.  “And Spike’s bed-hair?  Oh my God, that is huge !”

From within the kitchen came a clattering of metal and a snort from Dawn, followed shortly by under-his-breath mutterings from Giles.

“Please never say the words Spike and bed-hair in the same sentence again,” Willow deadpanned, though beside her Tara was chuckling into her hand.

“This obsession of his is getting out of hand,” Xander added, eyeing Buffy.  “First sex-bots, then what?”

Does he love me? 

“D-did anybody else notice that he tried to make it b-be Buffy, not just look like her?”

Thank you, Tara .

“I noticed,” Buffy answered softly, prompting Xander to stare at her with mixed irritation and incredulity.  “Xand . . . I know you’re concerned, and I appreciate it, but I can handle Spike.”

I think he does.

“Right Buff,” he answered after a moment, and she knew he remained unconvinced.

Buffy didn’t blame him, exactly.  Xander harboured a deep-seated sense of protectiveness that flared with particular intensity in matters related to Buffy’s love life.  She knew this originated with Xander’s more-than-friends feelings of years past, and had grown out of a desire to keep her from getting hurt and likely some unrecognized hope that if the others went away, he might have a shot.  He had really only approved of Riley, and Buffy wondered if that was because Xander could see himself in Riley where he could not with Angel, and certainly not with Spike.  Once the connection, however one-sided, between Spike and Buffy revealed itself – after he stopped laughing about it – this side of Xander came rushing to the surface with startling force.

And while she truly did appreciate his concern in the it’s-nice-to-know-he-cares-enough sense, at the same time, she resented that he seemed to think he knew better, or that her way of dealing with something was the right way only as long as he agreed with it.  He had been in full intervention mode when he thought she was having sex with Spike, and granted, Spike-related groininess aside, the Buffybot was acting very strangely.  But something about being told that what she was doing was wrong, without them even listening to her side of the story, truly rankled.

“I-I think he was just . . . lonely,” Tara said, meeting Buffy’s eye.

Another crash sounded in the direction of the kitchen, and Buffy glanced over to find Dawn standing in the doorway, clearly listening to the conversation and ignoring Giles, who was now hauling random items out from the drawer below the oven.  Dawn smirked far too knowingly, and for once Buffy hadn’t the energy to pretend her sister was completely ignorant about these things, as Dawn liked to say.

Willow ’s face scrunched with distaste.  “Maybe so, but a robot ?”

“Well, if he couldn’t have the real Buffy—”

“Ahn!”

“That was just Spike being Spike,” Buffy interjected, starling herself and the others with her easy dismissal.  At their slack-jawed stares, Buffy sighed and set her plate down on the coffee table.  “Okay, I know the robot thing is gross and way too . . . ick to think about, but he just got finished letting himself be tortured to protect Dawn.”

“So you’re what, just gonna let him get away with it?”

Typical , Buffy thought, setting her jaw and shaking her head slowly.  Apparently, Xander had exhausted his sympathy for the battered vampire with those few words about it back at the Magic Box.  “Says he who almost suggested earlier that we give the robot back to him.  Yes, I’m gonna let it slide.  The stupid robot is nothing compared to what he did for us today.”

Can he love me?

He can love.

“A-and he did something good for me, too, remember?” added Tara, squeezing the hand Willow placed into hers.

So what does that mean?

What do I want it to mean?

Xander scoffed.  “Yeah, by hitting you!”

It’s disgusting . . . disturbing . . . it’s . . .frightening.

“He hardly used his full strength, Xander,” Anya reminded him, her tone patronizing.

But why?

“It didn’t even bleed,” Willow agreed.

Because . . . he doesn’t have a soul.  Because if he really does love me, it means he can love without a soul.

“Okay, okay, I get it.  Spike’s a hero,” Xander snapped, setting his plate down heavily on the table.  “Can we please ease off on the love fest?”

And Angel can’t.

Whoa . . . so not going there!

Willow winced at the sound of the plate and the sharpness of Xander’s voice.  “I didn’t say hero . . . ”

I’m so there.  Spike is . . .

Different.

“Aha!” Giles cried, appearing in the doorway, triumphantly waving his fervently sought spatula.

Spike loves me.

Spike loves me. 

“Bloody hell. ”

Only when she noticed everybody staring at her again did she realize that she’d spoken aloud.  Then, her brain caught up with her and she remembered what she’d said and why, and her cheeks darkened with sudden embarrassment.

“What?  Um, uh, nothing, I was just . . . nothing.”

Nice, Buffy.  Real casual.

“Great,” Xander snorted.  “First she’s defending him, now she’s channelling .”

This was so not going to go well at all, Buffy realized.  She took in a deep breath, counted to five, and let it out before speaking again.  “Guys, sorry, I just have a lot on my mind, what with the death-is-my-gift and then, like, the whole mental rollercoaster of today.”

“Perfectly understandable,” said Giles.  “Perhaps you and Dawn should head home?  You could probably both use some rest, I’d wager.”

Yeah, ‘cause I’ll rest really well when I can’t think of anything but Spike . . . who’s lying beaten and defenseless in his crypt . . .

“Actually, I think I’m gonna patrol,” Buffy replied, looking toward Willow and Tara .  “You guys mind if Dawn crashes?”

“Ooh, slumber party!” Dawn chimed in, apparently pleased at the prospect.

“Of course, Buffy,” Tara answered, grinning broadly at Dawn, who flopped down enthusiastically next to her.

Buffy smiled in gratitude.  “Thank you.  Giles, thanks for dinner . . . I think I’m just going to go, so . . . see you all tomorrow?”

The room responded with a collective yes of varying descriptions, and each occupant offered her a farewell.  Buffy grabbed her long coat from the hook by the door and, slipping it on, reached for the handle.

“Hey, Buff?”

She looked over her shoulder to find Xander standing behind her, hands in his pockets and a hint of contrition on his face.  “Yeah?”

He smiled hesitantly.  “Be careful, okay?  With Glory all pissed off and everything.” 

There was that gently caring friend, and her heart flooded with relief.  Despite his faults, his tendency to hold grudges and blind himself with stereotypes, he cared about her, was one of her closest friends, and she’d hated to leave the evening on such a sour note.  “Thanks Xand.”

“See you tomorrow?”

Buffy nodded.  “You will.”

*~*

A/N: Written originally for Seven Seasons ficathon, in which writers picked from one of twenty available starting lines and had to include three prompts - 1)Giles searching endlessly for a spatula, 2)A reference to Howard the Duck, and 3)Xander saying, in reference to a male character, "Oh my god, that is huge".

Chapter Two – She Said, She Said

*~*

Buffy had truthfully intended to patrol.  Her one disastrous punching bag encounter hardly satisfied her need to hit something, and her fists positively itched with desire to sink themselves into the squishy and demonic.  This was one of those times when she was forced to admit that she not only enjoyed, but needed the physical rush she received from fighting.  The existence of this darker part of herself, the part she always tried to hide away in order to embrace normalcy, was partly to blame for her feelings of hardness, of turning into stone, as she’d told Giles.  She hated knowing that, even as she fought for the light, darkness existed inside her that she not only had to live with, but suspected was actually a good part of what gave her strength as the Slayer.  What truly galled her, though, was that Spike knew all about it, called her on it, refused to let her deny it, no matter what words she formed to the contrary.

Of course he would get it, she mused, scanning the quiet graveyard as she wandered slowly amongst the headstones.  That vampire is way too perceptive for my own good.

Though her bones ached for a good fight, her mind kept straying to Spike.  She felt just distracted enough that she feared she’d be unable to maintain her usual vigilance.  All she needed was to get caught up in another argument with herself long enough to miss the arrival of an opportunistic creature of the night.  Thoughts of heading home crossed her mind, but she recalled with unsettling guilt the image of the beaten vampire she’d left behind in his crypt that afternoon.

With a resounding sigh, Buffy made a decision and headed toward town, hoping she could scrounge enough dollars to get what she needed.

*~*

Paper bag clutched protectively beneath her coat, Buffy approached the crypt with caution, all her senses wide open in case anything lingered nearby.  She detected nothing, but kept her guard up all the same as she reached the door, noting with some relief – and how strange was that ? – that the door remained tightly shut.  After a moment of indecision, Buffy chose to knock softly.  She waited, and when no answer came from within, she pushed it open.  The creek of its hinges echoed in the silence.

Moonlight touched unlit candles and cast bluish shadows over the room.  The sarcophagus where she’d left Spike was vacant, but the nearby trapdoor stood open.  Edging inside, Buffy closed the outer door and waited for her eyesight to adjust to the dimmer light filtering in through the crypt’s high, dirty windows.  The relative darkness revealed a muted glow flickering up from the lower level, and Buffy made her way cautiously across the crypt.

“Spike?” she called softly.  She heard a muffled moan as she reached the hole in the floor, and peered down into the opening.

Spike was sprawled face-down in an uncomfortable pile of twisted limbs on the cement block at the base of the ladder.  It looked as though he had fallen through the hole and simply remained where he landed.  Buffy felt a rush of alarm flash through her, and she quickly navigated the narrow stair.

“Spike?” she repeated as she crouched next to him, fingers feathering over his shoulder, unwilling to jolt him awake or inadvertently hurt him by touching too firmly.

Spike mumbled something unintelligible, then fell silent a moment before his whole body grew rigid with tension.

“Spike, it’s Buffy,” she whispered.

Spike’s right eye snapped open, the left one swollen so much his lashes barely twitched.  “Slayer?” he croaked, taking in an obvious breath through his nose and then grimacing in pain.

She should have realized his injuries had affected his sense of smell when he didn’t mark her right away that afternoon.  “It’s me,” she assured him.  “Do you think you can stand, if I help?”

Spike groaned and turned with visible effort onto his back.  “Mind closin’ the door first, love?  Meant to do it myself, but my legs had other ideas.”

“Why’d you come down?” Buffy asked, as she pulled the heavy slab to cover the hole and descended the ladder.

“Figured it better’n waitin’ round up there for hell bitch’s lackeys to show back up,” he answered tersely, clearly agitated over his helplessness and likely her witnessing of it.  He sighed then and she heard the pain behind it.  “I come down here, ‘f I need to lie low a while.”

Buffy stepped gingerly around the supine vampire, climbing down to stand on the dusty floor while a groaning Spike managed to sit, legs dangled over the block’s edge.  She could see the amount of energy required for him to maintain the position, and knew he hated showing even temporary weakness, especially in front of her.  Although some of the abrasions had faded, his fall from the ladder had most likely aggravated his internal injuries, and his arms trembled from holding himself up.

She realized she was staring at him and quickly shifted her gaze, though she felt the lingering presence of Spike’s appraising eye.

“Why are you here, Slayer?”

She looked back up to find him staring at her intently, and she realized that some of the tension she saw in his body stemmed from anxiety over her presence. 

Probably expects me to take back what I said before , Buffy thought, knowing with sudden, self-depreciating certainty that such a turnabout from herself would be neither unexpected nor unprecedented.

She sighed, unsure of whether to smile at him or affect a more familiar expression.  She settled on more or less neutral, though she hoped she managed to convey her lack of hostility.  “Let’s get you off that block, okay, then we’ll talk.”

Judging by the surprise on his face, he clearly hadn’t expected those words from her.  He warred with himself over his response; Buffy saw his features flit between guarded and hopeful, irritated and pleased.  After a short inner conflict, he tilted his head to the left, toward the wall beside them.

“Got a couch round the corner there,” he answered, now looking more or less resigned to the fact that he needed her help to get to it.

It took several attempts, multiple curses, and her hitting her forehead on the block before they finally succeeded in getting him down.  As soon as he tried to take his weight, Spike’s knees buckled and Buffy had to brace herself against the concrete to keep him upright.  With Buffy’s shoulder wedged firmly into his armpit and her arm around his waist, they limped and stumbled their way around the wall and into the open room. 

It seemed Spike had made some effort to tidy the crypt since her last disastrous visit, for all but one of the dusty coffins with their dustier contents that had previously littered the space were now stacked against the side wall.  An oversized, well-made wooden casket sat in the middle of the room, with a few tables, shelves, and boxes of knickknacks – clearly scavenged – scattered nearby in a semi-ordered cluster, as though Spike had not yet figured out where to put them.  Buffy could see that what she had originally thought only a small, blind alcove actually contained a rubble-filled opening back to the ladder, as well as a doorway into yet another room.

Spike nodded toward the opening and Buffy half dragged, half carried him around the obstacles and through the opening in the back wall.  The room was about half the size of the alcove and almost entirely blanketed in darkness.  The glow from the torch near the stairs lit only the doorway, but it was enough for Buffy to make out the shape of a couch in the darkest corner.  Upon reaching it, Spike let himself fall away from her and onto it, wincing and muttering something like bloody hell .

“I . . . I’ll be right back,” Buffy said, backing toward the door, wanting to give him a little dignity while he arranged himself more comfortably.

She hurried back through the alcove and around the corner to the ladder, retrieving the paper bag from where she’d left it on the ground near the block.  She leaned back against the concrete for a moment, taking in a breath and steadying her nerves before heading back to Spike.  Not for the first time, she questioned her decision to come back here tonight, though the thought of him lying helpless, when anything could just wander in and take advantage, made her thankful that she had.  Showing concern for Spike’s wellbeing still felt foreign, but it was the least he deserved after everything he had gone through today.  That knowledge didn’t make it any easier, though, and in and of itself, it wouldn’t help her convince him of her good intentions.  That part was entirely up to her.

Buffy took down the torch from its place on the wall, reminding her of the night she’d first visited the lower level of Spike’s crypt.  The archway to the side passage where he had chained her stood empty, and the shrine of drawings, photographs, and clothing had fortunately disappeared.  She feared her resolve might have fled had she been forced to look at that reminder of the obsessive side of Spike’s feelings for her.  While she grudgingly admitted to herself that he did love her, things like that and the robot served as reminders that despite his changes, he still didn’t always understand the boundaries between appropriate and everything else on the other side of that shaky line.

When she returned to the small room, Spike sat with his back against the arm of the couch and his legs stretched across the cushions.  He leaned with clear exhaustion against the couch’s back, and watched her with a guarded expression as she touched the flame to the unlit torch on the wall nearest the couch, and then placed hers into the empty sconce by the doorway. His position left a small open space at one end of the couch, and she sat there, feeling awkward.  The tension in the room was obvious and Spike’s searching gaze oscillated rapidly between her face and the paper bag she held on her lap. 

“I uh . . . brought you some blood,” Buffy explained, tilting the bag forward so that he could peek at its contents.  “It’s just pig, but I thought you might need it.”

She could not read Spike’s expression, though she’d caught the brief flicker of surprise following her announcement of the bag’s contents.  His eye focused intently on the bag, but his face remained impassive.

“Have you eaten?”

Spike jerked his head back and looked at her as though only just realizing she was there.  The almost wild look in his eye faded immediately into recognition, giving the impression that he’d suddenly come out of a trance.  “Just what I had upstairs.  Wasn’t much.”

His gaze drifted immediately back to the bag and his fingers clenched and unclenched themselves against his jeans.  He was clearly starving.  What small amount of blood he’d consumed to this point hadn’t been enough to sate his hunger, more potent than usual due to the severity of his injuries.

Buffy reached into the sack and pulled out a plastic bag of blood, reaching across the couch to hand it to him.  With trembling fingers, Spike eagerly took it as his face shifted.  With a feral growl, he buried is fangs and his whole face into it, rooting like an infant in one instant, shaking and pulling at it like an animal the next.  He swallowed great, greedy mouthfuls, neither noticing nor caring that the excess dripped from the corners of his mouth and ran down his neck.

Buffy watched with a mixture of fascination and disgust, at once strangely intrigued and instinctually appalled.  She had seen Spike feeding before, from bags, bottles, and mugs, but never with the full, vampiric intensity he now displayed.  It spoke to both how hungry he was and how good he had become at controlling his instincts.  Chip or not, Buffy knew with certainty that any other vampire in this state of hunger would have braved the migraine and gone for her neck, tearing into it with the same ferocity as Spike showed devouring the bagged blood, or frying his brain in the attempt.

Spike quickly drained the bag, dropping it to the floor and wiping his face with the bottom of his ruined shirt.  He looked at her apologetically, an expression made more potent for the fact that it appeared on his demonic face, but took the second bag from her without complaint.  The immediacy of his hunger staved, he held it a moment, expression shifting toward curiosity.  “It’s warm?”

“I asked them to heat it there,” Buffy answered, mouth turning up in a tentative smile.  “Warm’s better, right?  The butcher didn’t even bat an eye, but I did catch him checking for my reflection.”

Spike’s mouth twitched with humour, though she saw his lingering uncertainty.  It wasn’t enough to make him question her generosity yet, though, and he calmly pierced the film of the second bag and drank.  He now showed far more restraint, sucking slowly but eagerly at the punctures without the violent, predatory motions, and by the time he finished, his hands no longer trembled and his face had returned to its human form.  He leaned back against the couch, meeting her eye quizzically.

Obviously, he wanted to know the reasons behind her uncharacteristic compassion, but Buffy didn’t know how exactly to explain it.  She could hardly just open her mouth and blurt out everything she’d been thinking since that afternoon, and she hadn’t thought far enough ahead to realize that he’d want an explanation.  She returned his look uncertainly, and this seemed to ease some of Spike’s wariness. 

“You’d be surprised,” Spike remarked, breaking the silence, “how many of us patronize that butcher.”

Small talk, Buffy thought with some relief, was something she could handle.  “More chip-heads out there?”

He scowled subtly at that, but let the slight go.  “Just me, as far as I know,” he answered.  “But every vampire has a night where food’s scarce and fresh pig’s better ‘n goin’ hungry.”

Buffy raised a sceptical eyebrow.  “And they couldn’t just eat the butcher?”

Spike chuckled at this.  “That’s been known to happen.”

“I have more, if you need it,” she offered, setting the bag on the floor below the couch.

Spike looked pointedly at the bag and back at her, the humour gone from his face and replaced with that hardened mask she’d come to realize represented his most guarded expression.  Whatever he was thinking or feeling, the pursed lips and slightly jutted jaw offered no clues and managed to appear menacing all at once.  “Yeah, about that . . .”

She thought she should feel offended that he would automatically question her motives, but found she could not.  Her treatment of Spike in the recent past offered him no reasons at all to trust her without suspect.  That afternoon, as she’d tried to express her gratitude for what he had done, she’d still been cold and businesslike, aside from the chaste kiss she’d given him.  How many times had she roughed him up, knowing that he could take it but was unable to fight back?  She didn’t make a practice of physically lashing out at harmless creatures, but while Spike could hit demons, he was harmless, in the physical sense, against her.  She had simply considered it the best way of dealing with Spike – violence was something he knew – never thinking that she might get better results appealing to other aspects of the vampire’s personality.

Aspects she hadn’t let herself recognize until tonight.

Intelligence sparkled behind those blue eyes of his, not just the rapacious hunger or wanton destructiveness she usually noted in vampires.  Certainly he glinted with that feral look at times, but never did Spike appear purely an animal.  Perhaps that was a result of existing for over a century or perhaps Spike really was that unique.  Whatever the reason for it, she could not deny it any more. 

“I wanted to thank you,” she answered, tentatively, “for today.  For what you did.”

He maintained the expression, what Buffy could only define as his Spike-face. “Already did that.”

Buffy felt her sense of defensiveness rising in the face of his continued standoffishness, and she crossed her arms over her chest.  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly nice about it.”

Spike leaned forward slightly, unable to fully suppress the grimace of pain in response to his movements.  “Just got done revelling in the afterglow of rompin’ with the robot,” he retorted. “Didn’t expect nice.  Sure didn’t expect a return visit with offerings of warm blood.”

A stab of fury tore through her and she glared down the couch at him.  “God, are you trying to make me change my mind?” 

Buffy knew he’d said it in a blatant attempt to goad her into anger, likely hoping that she’d lose patience in whatever game she was playing and get to the real reason behind her visit.  Nevertheless, Spike had the ability to get under her skin, to crack the surface of her resolve and poke at everything she tried to conceal like no other, and if he wanted her mad, he’d certainly get it.  Even though she knew it, she could no more prevent her response than he could start his heart beating.  “Why do I bother?”

He cocked his head to the side in a way that seemed both curious and filled with mockery.  “Why do you?”

She had no answer for that, at least not one she was ready to give him, and so narrowed her eyes and set her jaw, doing her best to maintain the expression as she stared at the beaten but determined face of the vampire at the other end of the couch.

When he spoke, his voice was low, grave, but thick with emotion he couldn’t bury despite the pointed nature of his words.  “If you’re here outta pity, I don’ want it,” he spat.  “Thanks for the snack but you can take your perky li’l hide and get gone.”

Buffy jumped to her feet so quickly she didn’t even recall moving, and was standing in front of Spike, gripping the tattered remnants of his t-shirt in her fists, face inches away from his.  “I’m not here out of pity, you jerk, I’m here because I wanted to help—”

“Don’ need—”

“No, you don’t, but I don’t know, maybe you might want it?”  She let go of his shirt with a violent opening of her hands, resisting the urge to shove him backward.  “Lord knows you deserve it.”

Buffy stood back and they stared hard at each other, his face unreadable, hers brimming with indignation.

Slowly, Spike’s facial mask fell, and one corner of his mouth curled in snide humour.  “Who are you, and what have you done with the Slayer?”

Buffy tossed her arms in the air and turned away from him, biting back a number of responses likely to lead to nowhere but more of this defensive posturing.  “God, you’re an idiot, you know that?” she growled, rounding on him again.  “I’m here because I wanna be.  I want you to know how much it meant to me what you did today a-and I wanted to make sure you were okay.” 

The last slipped out with far more candour than she was accustomed to using with Spike, leaving him clearly taken aback by her forwardness in admitting her concern for him.  The stunned expression that had replaced the sarcasm shortly faded into wariness.

“Trust me,” she said, sinking back down to her place on the couch, “it’s as weird for me as it is for you.”

If Spike had truly felt any measure of the hostility he’d expressed, his countenance showed no signs of it now.  He appeared contemplative, and regarded her in quiet speculation.  “And on that, we agree,” he decided at last.  “What gives, then?”

He was looking at her expectantly, and she searched his face for a moment, trying to read him.  She couldn’t quite place his expression, except to say that it seemed to hold a certain degree of guarded anticipation, as though he expected her coming words would either make his day, or ruin it entirely.

“What you did today,” Buffy began, trying to ignore the fluttering nervousness rising in her chest.  “Spike, you let her torture you!  You had the answer she wanted and you let her do . . . this . . . to you.”  She gestured vaguely in the direction of his battered face.  “You didn’t have to do it, but you did, and . . . it’s . . . incredible.  I’ve spent all evening trying to get my head around it.”

Buffy almost didn’t hear him answer.  Spike dropped his head and appeared to be watching his fingers pick at his chipped black nail polish.  When the words sounded, they came on a whisper of breath.  “Had to.”

“What?”

“I had to,” he repeated, keeping his head down, intently focused on the motions of his hands.  “I meant it, what I said before.  Couldn’t do that to you.”

When he looked back up at her, the depth of the emotion radiating from him overwhelmed her.  Intense, painful, vibrant feeling poured out to her from his one open eye, and from the honest, desperate expression on his broken face.  All pretence had vanished, and it was just Spike, open and vulnerable and laying his heart out before her. 

“I know it don’t matter much to you, Slayer, but I love you,” he continued, and this time the confession didn’t prompt her to turn away.  “’M fond of the Niblet, too, an’ whether you want me or not, I don’t hurt my women.  Not ever.”

Buffy recalled very few instances during the course of her life where she could say with any honesty that time actually stopped.  The most recent occurrence marked the singular most devastating moment of her existence, when her mother’s lifeless body lay before her and the world had come to a crashing halt.  Other occasions, no less significant, had likewise defied the laws of nature – the moment she truly understood the meaning of her calling, the day her father walked out of their home and away from her life, and a single, blissful, stolen moment during that fateful, rain-soaked night when innocence ceased to exist.

Spike’s words weren’t revolutionary; he had not divulged anything she had not already known.  Yet undeniably, something, some combination of timing, of tone, or her own newly acquired acceptance, rendered time and motion completely irrelevant.  Buffy’s stomach lurched, then dropped away altogether into weightlessness, and she sat, frozen, gaping with unbridled astonishment.  When her heart started beating again, it pulsed loudly, insistently in her ears, whispering its vehement demand for acknowledgement of the significance of the moment.  Time didn’t stop for just anything; what transpired in that instant may well have changed the world.

A beat passed and time resumed, and she struggled to form a coherent word.  After several arrested attempts, she managed an uncertain, “I . . .”

Spike closed off in a flash, clearly misreading the half-witted expression signifying her disorientation.  “Just . . . don’t,” he grumbled, looking down again at his hands.  “I know you don’t believe it’s real, just do us a favour and don’t rub it in.”

“But—”

“I mean it, Slayer.  If you—”

“I believe you.”

Buffy wondered if time stopped for Spike the way it had for her.  His fumbling hands stilled, chest froze mid-breath, and he slowly, warily raised his head to look at her.  His voice trembled as he whispered, “What did you say?”

Buffy tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone dry.  Her heart continued to pound and her hands trembled with nervousness at giving form to the notion that her one-time enemy, a soulless vampire, truly loved her.  “That you . . . love me.  I believe you.”

For a moment, he remained still and silent.  Then the glistening of hope in his eye intensified into that of unshed tears, and he blinked, ducked his head, and sucked in a deep, tremulous breath.  “Say . . . say that again.”

Buffy rose from her seat on shaking legs, and knelt down in front of him.  “I believe you, Spike,” she whispered, looking up into his uncertain face.  “I believe that you love me.  After what you did, everything you’re doing, how could I not?”

The silence stretched on while he took this in, staring at her with unabashed wonder.  He reached out a hand, timidly, and brushed back a lock of her hair, seemingly more surprised when she let him.  One corner of his bloodied mouth turned up into a ghost of a smile so tender Buffy wondered how she could ever have denied him this simple truth.

“Can . . . another bag, please?” 

She heard his struggle to keep his tone even, and stepped back to give him time to collect himself.  He nodded his thanks to her when she passed him another bag of blood, now cooled to room temperature, and bit into the plastic with his blunt teeth, maintaining his human visage.  Buffy returned to her seat and watched him surreptitiously as he drank, more than once meeting his eye over the curve of the bag.

When he finished, he set the empty plastic onto the growing pile on the ground beside him, and smiled subtly.  “Don’t know what to say to that,” he admitted.

Buffy couldn’t help grinning.  “Finally, I found a way to shut you up.”

Laughter flowed between them and it was easy and natural.

“Couldn’t replace you, you know,” Spike remarked, shifting his legs, bending one and draping the other over the edge of the couch.

Buffy took advantage of the additional room, and swivelled to face him, mirroring his pose.  “Hmm?”

“The bot,” he elaborated, mouth twisting hesitantly.  “Wanted to make it you , not just for . . . the other thing.  But it couldn’t be.  Figured that out right quick.”

Buffy tipped her head in acknowledgement.  She felt better with that affirmation, not only that he hadn’t wanted the robot just for sex, but that he realized how truly artificial it had been.

“It’s weird thinking about . . . what I’m trying hard not to think about,” she confessed.  “You know it was wrong, right?”

“Yeh, I know.”  If possible, he looked even more penitent, glancing at her only briefly before tipping his head back and scowling faintly at the cluster of roots above him.  He didn’t have to add that he hadn’t wanted her to find out about it.   “Thought it’d be the closest I’d get to the real thing.”

Buffy couldn’t deny him that rationale, no matter how wrong his actions had been, and so said nothing.  The silence that followed seemed headed toward awkwardness, until Spike took a renewed interest in the bag on the floor. 

“What else you got in there?”

Buffy followed his eyes and shrugged.  “More blood.  Stuff to clean your wounds.”

Spike chuckled quietly at that and replied, softly, “Vampire, love.  A bitta grit won’t kill me.”

“No,” she agreed, patiently, “but it’s gonna feel better clean.”

Buffy knew she was in trouble the moment his eyebrows lifted and his lip curled in that dangerously alluring grin.  “Maybe I like it dirty.”

Oh he most assuredly did, and damn him for the sudden heat in the room.  That voice coupled with that smirk should be outlawed, if solely for the completely unwarranted flush of desire currently coursing through her.  Well, she relented, perhaps not so much unwarranted as unsettling, because while Spike had certainly mastered the art of innuendo, Buffy wasn’t supposed to appreciate it.

“Oh, ew,” she protested, but it lacked conviction and the half-hearted attempt at a scowl ended with the corner of her mouth lifting in acknowledgement of her having walked head-on into it.

Spike replied with a widening leer that now included one suggestively curled tongue, and to her horror, Buffy felt her cheeks darken treacherously.  She looked away from Spike to the relative safety of the bag, not missing the huff of his delighted chuckle. 

“Will you let me clean you up or not?”  The shortness of her tone only betrayed her fluster, but for once the vampire had the good sense to ignore it.

Spike pivoted until both legs draped over the edge of the couch and pulled his tattered shirt over his head.  “’M all yours, Florence .”

Buffy’s next breath caught in her throat as she took in the extent of Spike’s injuries.  Livid bruising wrapped wicked fingers around his sides, hinting at more extensive contusions to his back.  A long knife wound marred the left side of his chest and a grisly puncture mark – she did not want to know what made it – puckered the flesh on the right.  More bruises ringed the wounds and littered his abdomen, and the mixture of purple and red colouring to his right clavicle suggested it might have been broken.  She suspected more than one of his ribs were, too, and his leg bore sufficient injury to render it incapable of bearing his weight.

It hurt just looking at him, except, with their little exchange not minutes old, it also really didn’t in a way that set her heart beating just a tiny bit faster.  Beneath the carnage, Spike-without-shirt quickly added up to Buffy threatening to drool on hers, and try as she might to focus solely on his wounds, Buffy could not stop herself from noticing and admiring his well-sculpted torso.  Not a chance in hell.

She had always taken note of Spike’s form with the appreciative eye of another whose wellbeing counted heavily upon physical fitness.  Xander’s narrative of compact but well-muscled described aptly the vampire’s physique.  Spike wasn’t a large man by any means, but what he lacked in stature he more than made up for in personality, strength and attitude. 

He looked smaller now, with the latter two by the wayside, but also, beautiful in a way she’d never truly considered.  Attraction to Spike was not something she generally let herself focus on, but in the back of her mind swam the constant knowledge that for all he was technically her enemy, Spike possessed a magnetic attractiveness that could not be denied.  It was only partly based on looks.  The slayer in her was attracted to his strength, his tenacity, his passion for what he called the dance every bit as much as the woman in her appreciated his physical attributes.  After everything else she’d admitted to herself tonight, Buffy found that the knowledge that she was indeed attracted to Spike settled in with little or no resistance.  Not that she would let him know that.

The glint in his eye told her, however, that she’d likely given away too much with whatever expression currently occupied her face, and she realized that she had actually been staring.  She resisted the sudden urge to check her chin for drool.

“Um, that looks painful,” she muttered lamely, quickly averting her eyes.

The warmth of his answering chuckle did nothing to slow her heart.  “Doesn’t tickle,” he drawled, and when she glanced back at him, his whole face was alight with mirth, despite the butchery.

Buffy reached for the bag and scooted over next to Spike, aware more than ever of his proximity.  That awareness had shifted from the basic Slayer/vampire tingle into something less duty-bound and more physically tingly, and Buffy wondered when exactly this had happened.  Now conscious of it, she realized it wasn’t something new at all.

Turning her focus once again to his wounds, though the other simmered in the back of her mind, Buffy rummaged through the bag for the first-aid supplies she had purchased before her stop at the butcher’s.  She bought only saline for cleaning, knowing even without Spike’s reminder the uselessness of more expensive antiseptics.  She poured the salty liquid into the provided bowl and opened the package of gauze squares into it.  Spike took the bowl, setting it on his thighs with a steadying hand wrapped around it.

“Lean back,” she instructed, and Spike complied, his back meeting the couch while he tipped his face up, both eyes closed, a subtle smile lingering on his lips.

Buffy hesitated a moment, studying his face, knowing how much the idea of her tending his injuries appealed to him.  Her desire to do so should have felt wrong, but it didn’t.  Compassion for her one-time enemy topped the list of emotions she felt as she gently started cleansing his wounds, and Spike sighed softly, relaxing into the couch and taking on an air of contentment.   

Buffy was conscious, as she worked, of the amount of physical contact necessitated by her task.  Both knees nestled snugly against his leg, and her forearm rested alongside the sculpted muscles of his upper arm, fingers splayed over his shoulder blade.  Her breast brushed against his chest each time she reached to grab a fresh piece of gauze from the bowl and straightened to apply it to his face, and her rebellious thumb was actually making purposeful circles into the smooth skin over his scapula.  Buffy thought it likely that Spike was even more aware of it than she; each time she moved, Spike gripped the bowl tighter and inhaled, holding unneeded breath in a clearly anticipatory way.  He tried to be subtle about the squirming of his hips as he attempted to ease the strain of his jeans over his obvious erection, just as he struggled not to groan when her hand dipped into the bowl resting against it.  She should mind that particular portion of his reaction, but she found she could not.  At one time, she would have found the idea of affecting him thus cause for immediate disgust, but if nothing else, her relationship with Riley had given her an insight into her own sexuality.  Nothing about Spike’s reaction came from piggish maleness; it was all about her, and she knew it, and the thought was purely exhilarating.  When he dared allow his hand to rest on her knee, Buffy did not protest. 

The whole situation did nothing to alleviate the warmth in her chest or the flush of her cheeks started by the relatively tame verbal exchange earlier.  It seemed that the moment she allowed her brain to accept her attraction to Spike, her body took the opportunity and ran wild with it, leaving her heart pounding and her stomach fluttering madly.  Some vestigial part of Buffy wanted to want to ignore the effect Spike was having on her, to want to see him as a disgusting monster, to want to pretend that she and Spike weren’t both becoming increasingly aroused with each swipe of the gauze and that he didn’t know it.  The truth remained, though, that once her perceptions of Spike altered, everything changed, and the disgusting monster fell away in favour of the brave, loyal man whose devotion to her and her sister resulted in this brutal beating.  The same man who was now making her feel more feminine, more powerful than she had ever felt before.  The sense of disgust over sharing such a moment with Spike never came. 

Spike’s fingers curled into her leg and his smile broadened, but he refrained from speaking in favour of just enjoying the moment.  It wasn’t every day, Buffy reasoned, he had a hot and not-so-bothered-about-it Slayer willingly playing Nightingale.

But things were becoming fairly intense, incongruously to the relatively innocuous contact between them, and she needed to break the silence in order to bring herself down a bit.  “So here’s the thing,” Buffy began, sounding far huskier than she wanted to consider. 

Spike’s eye fluttered open at the sound of her voice and focused on her as she continued speaking.

“I’ve been kinda, no, not kind of, more like very, or-or something bigger than very,” she stammered, sitting back a bit to swab at his chest wounds, though leaving her knees in contact.  “What’s bigger than very?”

His face shone with amusement.  “Incredibly?” he suggested, hissing softly when she inadvertently re-opened his knife wound.  “Immensely, enormously, or—”

“Enormously, that’ll work,” Buffy decided.  “Enormously blind.”

She tried to ignore the way his curl-lipped smile set her heart fluttering and the fingers on her thigh, now moving in an obvious caress, spread a trail of heat straight to her core.  “Your eyes were workin’ a few minutes ago,” Spike teased.

His voice rumbled seductively beneath her hand on his chest and reverberated through the subterranean room.  Buffy had been more blind than she realized not to have noticed before what a thoroughly and intensely sexual creature Spike was.  He’d turned on the charm the moment she’d given him an opening and knew very well what he was doing to her.

“I’m trying to tell you something,” she protested, though she sounded less than convincing in her complaint.

Spike’s fingers stilled but he kept his hand on her leg, and despite his lack of body heat, her skin beneath his palm burned hotter than her reddened cheeks.

“This, today, isn’t the first thing you’ve done, but it’s what made me open my eyes,” Buffy explained, speaking quickly, staring at his hand to avoid the smouldering look in his eye.  “You . . . I see how you’re trying, a-and I can’t, I won’t ignore it anymore.”

She glanced up and saw the smoulder replaced by something intense but unnameable that more than adequately conveyed how much her words touched him.  For a moment, Buffy thought he might say something, but he settled for bobbing his head and resuming the gentle circles on her leg.  Spike continued to watch her as Buffy drew her eyes away to tend his wounds, and she found this affectionate scrutiny far headier than his more obvious seductive efforts.

When she finished, their eyes met again and they shared a smile.

“Thanks, love,” Spike said tenderly, setting the bowl on the floor and then reaching to brush her cheek with the backs of his fingers.  A shiver ran through her in response, and Spike took in a deep breath, wincing notably.

“If it hurts, why are you breathing?”

“Habit,” he answered, now trailing his fingers slowly down her arm.  “Strong emotion or . . . other things . . . and I can’t help it.”  He paused, glanced down quickly and then looked back up.  “That meant a lot to me.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, Buffy’s breath coming heavier than usual in response to his persistent but gentle caresses and the potency of his emotions.  The intensity was building again and oh how easy it would be to just give in to it, give in to him .  He was barely touching her, and nowhere more intimate than her arm and clothed thigh, and already her pulse was racing fast enough for her heart to burst through her ribcage.  Each light touch sent slivers of lightening through her body, stoking the fire blooming low in her belly, and the achingly wet flesh at the apex of her thighs pulsed in time to her raging heart.  The ease with which she had reached this point with him surprised her, and her thoughts and feelings about it were confused enough that she knew she had to slow down before she lost her head completely.  Spike’s actions were as much, maybe more, based in emotion as they were in lust, and impulsiveness on her part may well lead to heartache for him. 

“Can you . . . not do that?” she whispered, and cringed when she saw the hurt creep into his face.  “No . . . it’s just . . . too fast, okay?”

The implication that an acceptable speed existed wiped away the wounded look, and he regarded her adoringly even as he rather grudgingly pulled his hands away from her.

She sighed her relief, though the loss of his hands did nothing to dampen her keyed-up state.  “Do you want more blood?”

The look of hunger in Spike’s eye had very little to do with blood, and she knew it, but he nodded anyway.  “Please.”

Buffy shifted her position to sit beside him, placing the length of her leg in contact with his, loath at this point to sever all physical connection.  She passed him the last of the blood and settled back into the couch while he bit into it, her breath as loud in her ears as the steady thumping of her heart.  This fourth bag Spike consumed leisurely, watching her with renewed contemplativeness.  Buffy remained acutely aware of his intent study, and attempted to search inside herself for the source of her sudden and powerful response to him.  It wasn’t entirely physical, of that she was certain, but like everything else tonight, her recognition of it was too new to have sussed out all the details.  The fact that her heart pounded more forcefully during his most emotional moments indicated some degree of emotional involvement from herself, but she had only begun to scratch the surface of its discovery.

When Spike finished, he let his eyes fall shut and leaned back into the couch, chest rising and falling with unneeded but apparently involuntary breaths.  He appeared to settle in for an extended rest, and Buffy turned her head to watch him.  Despite the hideously wounded face, he appeared peaceful, almost angelic and somehow younger in repose; so completely different from the Spike he showed the world.

Stripped of the defensiveness, the cocky bluster, the Big Bad attitude, the man beneath showed through with startling clarity.  Much of the way Spike carried himself was in effort to protect this surprisingly vulnerable side that he so rarely allowed to surface.  She had seen glimpses of it in the past.  The night he chained her up and professed his love to her he had released that part of him, but she had been too mortified, too furious, to recognize it for anything other than the twisted manifestation of a soulless creature’s unfortunate obsession.

That part of him peeked out night he came to her in search of a truce, to stop Angel from destroying the world and to win back the affections of his lover.  That hint of vulnerability exposed, and Buffy had pounced on it immediately.  It had shown in those few, desperate minutes he waited outside, starved and smoking, for Giles to invite him inside after the chip.  It was there the night at the Bronze, when he’d attempted to kiss her, and once again she had seen his vulnerability and used it to her advantage.  He had perfected the bravado, that tough-guy persona, as a safeguard, for his own self-preservation.  To let this secret part of him out meant showcasing what, to the demon world, amounted to the ultimate weakness.

She could no longer ignore that this side of Spike existed.  For all he was technically evil, he possessed a sense of honour, of morals, to which he held firm.  Perhaps they often differed significantly from the sort of morals considered, well, moral , but something inside her whispered that it mattered more that he had them in the first place.  Buffy had learned today that he was also fiercely loyal.  His devotion to Drusilla showcased that, in retrospect, as much as his actions of this afternoon.

She would never trust just any vampire to keep his word, whether or not the deal involved large sums of money.  Chances were she’d find herself double-crossed, dead, and out a couple hundred dollars.  While one or two moments of less-than-stellar word-keeping on Spike’s part flashed in her memory, she had yet to end up dead or even truly double-crossed.  Yeah, his stunt with the doctor saw Riley’s life in danger, but really, she should not have tried to have Spike help her for Riley’s sake – his part in Spike’s chipping notwithstanding – and she hadn’t exactly been encouraging with attitude or the rewards, either.

He had kept his word during their truce to stop Acathla – took Angel out of the fight while she handled the minions and kept Drusilla distracted.  He had not actually promised never to return to Sunnydale.  Spike had watched over Dawn and her mother, with the words of recognition of his strength and her need for it his only payment.  He patrolled the graveyards as faithfully as she, and while logically he did so to satisfy his innate need for violence as well as his more unsettling urges to stalk her, more than once she came across the remnants of something big and ugly and very recently dead and felt a rush of gratitude that she hadn’t had to fight it herself.  And then, defying everything he was supposed to be, everything she thought he was, Spike had looked a hellgod in the face while she tortured his body and refused to reveal a secret that, if spoken, meant certain death to someone other than himself.  He had chosen his own suffering over the suffering of another.  Another that wasn’t even her.   That was huge.

There was something inherently different about Spike.  The realization was not new, but her recognition of it was profound.  Perhaps it had something to do with age, for most of the vampires she encountered were fledglings, or those less than two decades old.  Her experiences with master vampires was limited to a handful, and even that selection biased itself with a rather homogenous sampling, for five of them belonged to the same ancient line.  The differences between elder vampires and younger existed, for to live as long as they had required certain strengths and intelligence lacking in many vampires – and the stupid-enough-to-linger-alone-at-night humans from which they were sired.

Of those masters, however, only Spike – discounting, of course, the anomaly represented by soulful Angel – had ever done anything not geared toward some personal gain.  After more than a year of living with the chip in his head, Spike had adapted, learned to survive on his own.  He did not need to remain in her good graces in order to maintain his existence, and yet he continued to help her out, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes in small ways she hadn’t even consciously recognized. 

Despite the odds, completely contrary to everything she’d ever been taught about the nature of vampires, Spike was actively trying to be good.  At present, his feelings for Buffy provided the impetus for this shifting of character.  Certainly, much of what he had done and not done related to his attempts to earn her attention, possibly her respect, likely her trust; the amazing part was that he was trying at all.

Everything pointed toward the glaring truth that at the heart of Spike was a man.  A man unlike most, perhaps, with his demon companion constantly whispering sweet nasties in his ear, but a man.  She saw that man clearly, her denial over his existence crumbled to dust in the face of evidence she could no longer ignore.  She saw a vampire struggling against everything he was supposed to be, to become something else.  She saw the creature that by destiny represented her mortal enemy fighting by her side in her endless battle against evil.

Spike wanted to be good, wanted to do good, even though it warred with his instincts.  She saw the conflict, the reluctance at giving up the lifestyle lived over twelve decades for something so foreign, so far outside of his realm, and the simultaneous struggle toward embracing this new path, fraught with sunlight and crosses and sharp, pointed wood.  Today, Spike tried to be good for her , but she saw, saw so clearly she wondered if this new view of him was actually something more prophetic, that someday, someday soon, Spike would strive to be good for himself.

In the face of everything she had realized tonight, the fact that her vehement rejection of the notion that Spike was in love with her had faded into nothingness failed to shock her.  Neither did she doubt the veracity of his feelings.  He did not love her in some twisted, vampiric parody of human emotion.  This love was real and honest and immense.  With his usual guards stripped away, this simple truth radiated from him with brilliant intensity, and rang powerfully in her heart.  And for the first time, this knowledge was not cause for upset or disgust.  That he was capable of such real emotions – where other vampires certainly were not – only bolstered her revelation that Spike was unique . . . special . . . one of a kind.  And he was hers.

Gobsmacked , Buffy figured, was the best way to describe how that stray thought left her feeling after it rocketed its way through her consciousness.  While she undoubtedly owned his heart, however unintentionally on her part, thinking of Spike in the possessive sense was something to which she was completely unaccustomed.  And yet, in a way, he was hers.  Her greatest adversary, her resident pain-in-the-ass, her strongest fighter, and at one time, her only option.  Spike suddenly felt more hers than Angel ever was, and the implications of this threatened to knock her universe right off its axis.

Looking into the endless blue depths of his one visible eye, Buffy saw the possibilities, the potential, that someday this vampire – this man – could, would, coexist with her in an entirely different way.  Already he had managed to tumble down some of her own walls, revealing an emotional connection she hadn’t known existed, mingled somewhere within immediate, overwhelming desire that had, if she were honest with herself, simmered just below the surface for a very long time.  With the world around her spiralling out of control, she didn’t think she could take the time to explore this potential, even if she wanted to.  Something inside her whispered that she did want to find out if Spike could live up to everything she suddenly saw when she looked at him.

Because she did see it, that potential, a potential for greatness beyond anything she could fathom, and while it frightened her, it also thrilled her and filled her heart with an inexplicable sense of pride.  While she didn’t understand it, she knew with certainty that she was proud of him, for everything he was trying to be.

She did not love Spike, but knew that if something happened to him, she would mourn him.  This feeling wasn’t new, either.  Had Glory killed him and she never learned that Spike had refused to talk, or if she’d been forced to dust him herself, she would have felt his loss deeply.  Her world just would not be as interesting without Spike in it.  At times, her polar opposite, at others so startlingly complementary, he fit into her existence in such a unique and irreplaceable way that having him gone from the world would leave a gaping hole that no other could hope to fill.  When he had become this, Buffy didn’t know, but could tell it wasn’t a new state of being.  Likely this odd entanglement had grown upon them slowly, below the radar, outside the recognition of either of them.  Perhaps, she pondered, it had been there all along.

How many times had they failed to kill each other?  Were those failures the result of being so evenly matched, or did it involve something more karmic?  Spike was the greatest adversary she had ever faced – greatest, because everyone else she had gone up against, she had beaten, but not Spike.  He had won as many small battles as she, but neither one had yet bested the other.  Spike gave it as good as he got, whether physically or verbally, and she mourned the loss of his ability to fight with her in the physical sense, despite the obvious benefits.  But so long as he existed, he remained to fill that part of her she had only just discovered.  While she would have no shortage of opponents if Spike became dust, she’d certainly never find another like him.  Likewise, she understood intuitively that long after she left this world, no matter how many slayers he faced – assuming, of course, that he managed to lose that chip – none of them would ever represent to him what she did.

So no, she did not love him.  But she respected him, trusted him, and with everything she had come to realize tonight, she could look upon the man behind the rough exterior and consider him a friend.  The potential for more-than-friend hovered tantalisingly in front of her; part of her was pretty certain she’d already grabbed onto it, and that leap, while initially terrifying, buzzed with potentiality.  Her feelings for Spike were changing and her acknowledgement of it failed to register as shameful or disconcerting.  The possibility that someday she would look at him and realize that she returned the feelings he held for her no longer seemed to linger solely in Spike’s imagination.  Her body tingled with anticipation, excitement, as though this one thought amongst millions was the first step in a long, arduous, epic journey, one that would lead her in directions unforeseeable, the final destination a place of untold greatness.

This shifting of paradigms, while so clear to her now, would grow murky and muddled again come morning.  With daylight came doubt, denial, and the opinions of those yet to make the shift in thinking that brought her to this place.  Buffy stood on the cusp of accepting that which her entire being was meant to reject, and that sort of devastating change was simply too much to handle all at once.  Right now, she could almost make that leap of faith, could nearly throw everything away and take that chance, but reality, common sense, and duty held her back.  Everything inside of her led her to the truth that one day she would do it – this had moved into inevitability, no longer mere possibility – but with hellgods on the loose, sisters to protect, duties to uphold, and friends not yet ready to accept it, she could not let go and take that jump.  She would have to go with baby steps, small shuffles ever closer to the edge of that tempting chasm.

She would start by showing her faith in Spike, despite the expected opposition.  Only by allowing him the chance to prove himself to them, by showing them that she trusted him – by showing Spike that she trusted him – could he ever hope to reach that potential she saw glowing around him like an aura.  It wouldn’t come easily.  Just as he’d fought against his burgeoning feelings for her, she would fight to maintain her recognition of the changing nature of her feelings for him. 

Buffy came slowly to the realization that for an inordinate amount of time, she and Spike had been looking into each other’s eyes.  The silence had stretched on between them, not uncomfortably, leading to her many revelations.  She thought it possible that the odd glimmer of something in Spike’s eye signified revelations of his own.

When his hand found hers, it seemed only natural to lace their fingers together.

“Buffy,” he said softly, and the use of her name rather than her title set every nerve in her body buzzing with sensations she could not define.  “Penny for your thoughts, love.”

Buffy huffed quietly.  “I could ask you the same thing.”

“Might frighten you.”

“Well, mine would frighten you,” she replied, then raised her free hand to form a claw and said, “Grrrr.”

Mingled laughter filled the darkness of the subterranean room, dwindling down until only the sound of their breathing – and it didn’t seem shocking that Spike would have maintained that habit – broke the silence.  Spike’s eye regarded her a moment longer with the same openness to which she’d grown accustomed over the course of the evening, but just before he dropped his gaze, Buffy saw some of his barriers rise back into place.  Though he kept hold of her hand, his whole body vibrated subtly with nervousness.

“Slayer . . . Buffy.  What is this . . . all of this?” 

There was that vulnerable Spike again, that sensitive man terrified of being hurt, as he had been often in the past, and many times by her own hands, her own words. Her heart broke for him, that such a radiant soul should live out its existence in this monstrous shell.  Despite the fact that he technically had no soul, many of Spike’s characteristics forgot that they were only supposed to manifest in soulful human beings.  And that thought added another pull on the already shaky axis of her reality.

Buffy sighed softly, and squeezed his hand tighter, strengthening this physical connectivity.  While she couldn’t hope to put to words everything she was feeling inside, her brain supplied her with a simple but truthful explanation that would do just as well, for now.   “This . . . it’s your crumb, Spike, if you still want it.”

At first he remained stony-faced and uncertain, but as the moment ticked on and her statement lay open and un-repealed, the mask faded away and his eye shone with gratitude.  The most genuine smile he had ever shown slid smoothly onto his face, and he looked down when the emotions of the moment became too great to hide, but to personal to share fully.

“Buffy, I . . .” Spike trailed off, shaking his head as he, the vampire who never shut up, struggled to find words.  In the end, he looked back up at her, hand on the back of his neck, grin lessening into a small, serene smile, and said, “Thank you.”

Anything else she tried to say, any words of explanation, would only ruin the moment.  With the amount of insight she’d gained into his nature tonight, simply by sharing a few hours of quiet sincerity, without their barriers in place, she was certain that Spike had come to understand her more profoundly as well.  So instead of trying to explain herself, to explain what had brought her to that point, she chose to take her confession one baby step further.

“I can’t promise you that we’ll ever be more than we are now,” she said, reaching as they turned to face each other to take his other hand into hers.  She looked down at her lap, at the strong yet gentle hands tangled with hers.  “But I can’t say that we won’t and . . . there’s something inside me whispering that when I let myself take that chance, we’ll be greater than anything either one of us can imagine.”

She had not intended to say that, had meant to stop after I can’t say that we won’t , but the words that followed flowed unbidden, demanded an audience, refused suppression, at once freeing and utterly terrifying.  The shock on her own face was nothing compared to the expression on Spike’s when she looked back up.  Astounded didn’t even begin to cover it.

*~*

~Abby

Chapter Three ~ You Say You Want a Revelation

*~*

The air in the crypt sparked with electricity, and the space between them crackled with palpable energy.  Buffy’s every nerve ending tingled and her fingers, still tangled with Spike’s, burned with invisible flames.  Spike’s one open eye bored into hers, impossibly blue and wholly astonished.  For the second time that evening, the Earth screeched to a sudden, gut-wrenching stop, stalling in its orbit and rendering time and space and everything else meaningless.  Nothing existed in that moment outside of Buffy and Spike.

“What . . . did . . . did you just say what I think you said?”  Spike’s voice, a wavering, halting, audible representation of the bewilderment on his face, jolted the world back into motion.

Buffy blinked and broke eye contact while she struggled to make her mouth work.  This time Spike waited, wide-eyed and holding his superfluous breath, for her response.  “I . . . did,” she managed, and when their eyes met again, a surge of energy coursed through her.

The way Spike gasped as she did told her he’d felt it too.  

“But you didn’t intend to say it,” he added after a long moment of weighty silence.

“No, I . . . I didn’t even intend to think it,” she admitted, unable to tear her eyes from his.  “But . . . I meant it.”

Silence befell them, heavily laden with everything that lay unspoken between them.  Whispers of possibility, of anticipation, of desire hung in the air, and every deep, shaky breath she drew into her lungs spread the sensations like fire through her veins.  The crypt was cool but Buffy only felt heat, the warmth of Spike’s intent gaze and the incredible heat blooming in her chest.  Desire was only part of it; it was there, no doubt, but this heat was different, both strangely soothing and wildly exhilarating, and it took up residence inside her with a sense of belonging, of inevitability.  Her eyes widened with comprehension, even as Spike continued to stare at her with mingled expectation, trepidation, and longing.

And with undeniable, profound certainty, Buffy understood that this was the moment, the place in time where the last of her walls crumbled to ash beneath the inferno raging between them.  She had not said if.   Her unintentional confession dealt in absolutes, and no part of her offered any hint of denial that she had taken that giant, final step over the edge of the precipice.   That inevitability of one day had become this day.  Buffy was falling hard and fast and headlong, but the prospect of winding up so far gone she’d never get out failed to frighten her.  Instead, it filled her with blissful serenity so immense she wanted to cry from the sheer rightness of it.

She had done epic and messy.  She’d been tricked into the one-night-stand and had settled for the so-called normal relationship.  Buffy knew heartache, and thought she’d understood love, but she hadn’t, not fully.  It wasn’t drama and misery; neither was it pretty, empty words nor safe, reliable tedium.  Love was real, raw and visceral; it was unpredictable, undeniable, full of pitfalls and shining highs.  It was acceptance, pride, and passion, earth-shattering, mind-blowing, and breath-taking.  Love was fire and ice, hate and lust and blood, and no matter what, it was home.  It was belonging.  No wonder Angel and Riley left; she had never truly belonged to either one of them.  Looking now into Spike’s broken face felt like a long awaited homecoming.

Some of this must have shown in her expression, because the furrow of Spike’s bruised brow lessened, and all that shone from his face now was renewed astonishment and overwhelming love.  He continued to regard her with this blatant awe for countless minutes, before his expression sobered.

He leaned toward her to trail the tips of his fingers down her cheek.  “When the sun comes up, this ends, doesn’t it?”

Buffy leaned into his caress, and Spike’s hand cupped her face, his thumb moving over her cheek in a feather-light circle.  “No. . .” she breathed, eyes drifting shut as she submitted to his touch.

His other hand rose, brushing through her hair and skimming over her shoulder.  He tangled his fingers into the golden strands, and the fluttering dance of Buffy’s heart, echoed by that of the fireflies in her belly, quickened as Spike leaned toward her.  Buffy held her breath, waiting, but the anticipated kiss never came.  Spike’s lips instead brushed lightly along the line of her jaw and his cheek came to rest against hers. 

His breath as he spoke tickled her ear and sent tingling shivers through her brainstem and down her spine.  “You sure about that?”

She wanted to be, more than anything.  She wanted to assure him that his fears lacked validity, but she could not, and a sudden heaviness settled in her heart with that realization.  Best intentions easily fade into nothingness, and he deserved more than a promise she was unsure if she could keep.

Spike moved to rest his forehead against hers, one hand still playing in her hair, the other resting again on her thigh.  “The truth, Buffy,” he whispered.

Buffy inhaled a shaking breath.  Spike’s attentiveness had her feeling lightheaded, making coherency difficult, but she forced her mouth to work.  “I . . . can’t ignore what you did . . . but it . . . things won’t be this easy, when tonight’s over,” she admitted, and felt Spike’s emotional exhalation breeze over her face.

When he pulled back to look at her, Buffy offered what she hoped was a reassuring smile.  “But I’ll try,” she added, and Spike waited with rapt attention for her to continue.  “Try like you’re trying . . . Spike, this is, what I’m . . . God, you’d think I didn’t grow up speaking this language.”

The warmth in his answering chuckle lifted some of the heaviness from her heart.  “Butchering it’s more like it,” he teased.  His fingers tickled her leg and he cocked his head to the side and tipped it up in a brief nod.  “You’re doin’ fine, sweetheart.”

The endearment brought a grin to her face.  Before tonight, if anyone told her that Spike calling her sweetheart had the power to turn her insides into mush, Buffy would have either laughed them to death or knocked them unconscious.  The obvious internal squishiness, suffused in tingling warmth, effectively ripped apart that theory and gave her much-needed encouragement to keep speaking in spite of her inherent difficulty with expressing herself verbally.

“Today . . . tonight . . . a lot of things started changing for me,” she began, trying to maintain eye contact but finding the directness intimidating.  “What I thought I knew is gone, and things I never wanted to consider are staring me in the face.  I’m confused and I’m terrified and I . . . I want to know what can come from all this.”

Buffy met Spike’s eye again, and set her hand atop his where it rested on her leg.  “But this, it’s . . . monumental.  Not a leap I can take overnight.  There are factors . . . endless things standing in my way.  I want to give you something more, I really do, but I can only try.” 

Spike was nodding slowly, taking everything in with barely contained hope.  Already, she knew, she had given him more than he ever thought he’d receive, but it still didn’t feel like enough – not after tonight, after everything. 

Buffy reached out a trembling hand to cup his cheek, mirroring his earlier gesture.  “I think . . . no, I know .  I just stepped over that ledge, Spike, and I’m falling.  I think I’m falling hard.  I just don’t know when . . . I’ll land.”

It was as close as she could get, but Spike understood immediately the meaning behind her confession.  His gaze softened and turned inward, a love-struck parody of his hunger-trance.  When it cleared, he pressed a kiss into her palm, then took her hand in his.

Spike leaned toward her again, and this time when his lips touched her jaw, he trailed along it a line of kisses toward her ear.  Blunt teeth nibbled on the fleshy lobe while the hand on her leg migrated to her hip.  His fingers pressed into her flesh, insistent but gentle as they tugged her toward him.  Buffy’s head swam and the fire in her belly roared tenfold as her body met the cool expanse of his chest. The position was awkward; too many legs and not enough space to accommodate them, and she was wary of leaning too heavily against his wounds.  Of their own volition, however, her fingers curled into the firm muscles beneath them, and Spike’s hand, moving from her hip to rest low on her back, seemed intent on keeping her there.

The unbelievably soft lips now focused on her neck, vibrating deliciously from the rumbling in Spike’s chest.  “When you do, whenever that is,” he murmured into her flesh, “I’ll be waiting there to catch you.”

Buffy let her head fall to the side, one arm snaking around Spike’s neck, and breathed a soft sigh.  “I never thought for a minute that you wouldn’t be.”

“Well, that’s something,” he answered, between moist kisses.  “That’s more than something.”

Buffy stroked the back of his neck with her fingers, surprised at the softness of his hair beyond the reaches of the ubiquitous lacquer.  “It’s not as much as you deserve,” she whispered, “but it’s all I’ve got.”

The next instant saw her bereft of Spike’s attentive lips as he pulled his head up, guiding hers with gentle fingers on her chin to meet his eye.  “Buffy, you’ve just given me more than I ever dared hope for,” he told her, then smirked.  “Well, can’t say I never hoped , but I certainly never thought . . .”

“That makes two of us,” she finished.

A shared smile flitted between them.  With gentle hands on her shoulders, Spike eased Buffy back, and stretched his leg out beside her along the back of the couch.  His other dangled over the edge, leaving an open space in the middle waiting in clear invitation.  Without hesitating, Buffy untucked her legs from beneath her and sat down on her backside, slowly shuffling forward as she draped her legs overtop his. 

“C’mere,” Spike said softly, slipping his hands around behind her to pull her into his lap, scooting toward the middle of the couch to make room for her legs behind him.  “That’s better.”

Buffy’s breath quickened as she settled onto him, acutely aware of the hard bulge of his erection nestled between her legs.  Ever so slightly, Spike tilted his hips forward as if to say, see what you do to me?   Beyond that, he made no further moves, did nothing to indicate that he expected anything of her, despite undoubtedly realizing the extent of her own arousal.  Though the evidence of his desire continued to press into her through the thin fabric of her pants, Buffy felt incredibly un-pressured.  There was no smugness, no demands or expectations, only the tenderness of a man who loved her unconditionally. 

Buffy draped her arms over his shoulders and let her head fall forward until her forehead came to rest against his.  Spike combed his fingers through her hair, one hand wrapping around the nape of her neck, the other drifting back down to hold her in place.

“Of course we’ll be great together, Buffy,” he whispered, his lips lightly brushing over hers as his words ripped through her with lightning intensity.  “We’re already bloody fantastic.”

She barely had the time to take in a shuddering breath before Spike’s lips descended upon hers with feverish speed.  Buffy threw herself into the kiss immediately, one arm tightening around his shoulders while her other hand moved to cup his cheek.  As if encouraged by her enthusiastic response, Spike tugged her even more tightly against him, ignoring his own physical discomfort as he plundered her mouth fervently.  A rumbling growl rose in his chest as Buffy swept her tongue over his bottom lip.  Accepting her invitation, Spike’s lips parted, his tongue joining hers in its eager, intimate exploration.   

Buffy hadn’t known it was possible to drown while simultaneously forgetting the need to breathe.  There had been sparkage when she kissed Angel.  With Riley, something like fluttery butterflies that stopped dancing somewhere along the way.  Kissing Spike, there were flames – bright, blazing, and eternal.  The inferno consumed her, cocooned her in warmth so fulfilling, so sensational, that the mere thought of her lips ever leaving his shot pangs of loss straight through her thundering heart.  How could a being who generated no body heat feel so breathtakingly warm?  It didn’t matter.  Breathing didn’t matter.  This was it.

Though she had sworn off oxygen, when Spike broke the connection, Buffy sucked in great, needy breaths, dizzy from the lack of air and the intensity of the kiss, unlike anything she’d ever experienced before.  She did not know what it was about kissing Spike that made her feel as though all her previous kisses amounted to nothing more than practice.  Was she simply caught up in the moment, the excitement of her changing feelings and the thrill of the forbidden?  Or did the energy she felt surging between them originate from something more, something deeper they were only starting to discover?  Again, that sense of anticipation, of standing on the cusp of something incredible, tingled in the back of her brain and broke her out all over in goosebumps. 

Spike pressed his brow to hers, chest rising and falling in the same frantic pattern as Buffy’s, and a powerful shiver tore through her.  “Buffy . . .” he breathed.  The fingers of the hand holding her in place tucked beneath the hem of her shirt, drifting over her pebbled flesh of her back in light circles, and his other hand moved from her neck to trail up and down her arm.  “Cold?”

“Warm,” she corrected, stoking the back of his neck and shivering again beneath the tenderness of his caresses.

“You feel it too, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she replied breathlessly.  “I—”

“Shhh,” Spike interrupted, the flicker of air tickling her face.  “Told you, love . . . fantastic .”

The second kiss was every bit as spectacular as the first, but slower, gentler, as though each movement of his lips, glide of his tongue, served to commit her, kissing her, to memory.  Through the blissfulness of the kiss, another twinge of regret hit her when she realized he was preparing himself for tomorrow, when all of this ended.  He possessed the quiet desperation of a man certain of the imminence of his loss.  Spike knew this was the last time he’d ever hold her in his arms, and neither her presence now, nor her confession that she was falling in love with him, could convince him otherwise.  At the same time, he kissed her with the barely restrained passion of a man fighting to ensure he wasn’t forgotten either, even if she never touched him as intimately again.  He wanted this to stay with her, wanted her to remember, as she lay alone and awake in her bed at night, how much she had wanted him, how bloody fantastic the two of them could be, if she only gave them a chance.

Problem was, Buffy knew that his feelings weren’t unreasonable.  Right now in his arms, she could do it, could throw away everything she was supposed to believe and embrace this new, terrifying, exhilarating future.  What she felt for Spike wasn’t new, even if her recognition of it was, and she was not confusing desire for true feelings.  She understood the difference.  Her chance prediction and his assurances of the extraordinariness of the two of them rang truer than ever, and no part of her doubted it.  Spike and Buffy, together, could change the world. 

She also understood, with heart-wrenching certainty, that daylight changed the look of things.  Tonight happened so fast, denying Buffy the time to talk herself out of it.  Only that afternoon, she had wanted him dusted, ready to convict him for crimes not committed, on the fact of what he was, without ever finding out who .  Only hours later did she understand Spike had changed, and grudgingly admitted that he loved her.  Now, nothing about that knowledge felt grudging .  Buffy’s heart pounded at the thought that this man loved her more than anyone ever had, or ever would, and that she was in the act of falling for him just as deeply.  Everything had a surreal aspect to it, almost as though she were outside of herself, seeing everything through new, or perhaps unclouded, eyes.  Strangely, it also felt more real than anything else in her admittedly bizarre world. 

Would the shadows of doubt, the clouded vision, creep up again come morning?  Buffy wanted to lie to herself and say, with conviction, that it would not, but she understood her own intimate relationship with denial more than she cared to admit.  She dreaded the end of the night and the dawn of morning, with its brightly lit spaces and conveniently cast shadows in which to hide the pieces of herself she thought she needed to conceal.  Spike might not be able to stand out in the light, but he didn’t deserve to be tossed into the shadows, either.  Could Spike survive the return of her usual jaded self?  Buffy didn’t know if she could.

A long moment later, Buffy realized the wetness on her face was tears, and that they were her own.  She released a whimpering sigh, and Spike pulled away to look at her with concern.

“Buffy . . .?”

Buffy dropped her forehead onto his shoulder and sighed again.  “I just . . . I don’t want this to end.”

Spike cradled the back of her head with his hand and placed a kiss into her hair.  “Neither do I, sweetheart,” he answered, “but you know it will.”

Buffy turned her face so her lips brushed against his neck and tightened her arms around his shoulders.  “God, I’m going to break your heart.”

“Look at me,” Spike whispered, waiting quietly until she complied, then wiping away her tears with his thumb.  “You wouldn’t still be here if you didn’t want this,” he continued, pausing to kiss her lips gently.  “But it’s easy down here, love.  Just two people exploring something incredible.  It’s easy to see what’s in front of you, feel what you feel, down here.”

Buffy nodded solemnly as another tear slid swiftly down her cheek.  She could see moisture glinting in Spike’s eye as well, and hoped he wouldn’t start crying in earnest.  If he did, she had no chance of stopping.

Gentle fingers traced the path of the tear and continued to draw random patterns into her flushed cheek, leaving her skin tingling.  “But you go up there,” Spike said, tilting his head in the direction of the ceiling, “and you’re Buffy the Vampire Slayer, surrounded by her righteous, demon-hunting mates, and there’s me, down here, a demon in the dark.” 

She knew she had it wrong, then.  Spike’s heart wasn’t the only one breaking.  “Spike . . .” she whispered, but he quieted her with a soft kiss.

“I know what you want, Buffy,” he assured her, voice barely above a whisper.  “I know what I want.  But life – your life – doesn’t want it.”

She closed her eyes tightly against the oncoming flood of tears.  “I wanna try.”

“I know,” he answered, kissing each of her eyelids with trembling lips.  “An’ I think you will, but it’s not gonna be easy.”

“I just . . . need time.”

“And you’ll have it.” 

Relief swelled in her heart with the knowledge that he understood, that he recognized she wasn’t here just playing with him, leading him on only to throw it back in his face come morning.  No, Spike realized the inherent difficulties in following the path ahead of them, and while certain they would take a giant leap backward tomorrow, he was willing to give her the chance to find her way back.  Buffy’s heart told her to hit the road running, but her head reminded her of all the obstacles littering the passage and urged her to proceed with caution.  She knew that once she started on the journey, there was no going back.  When she did it was all out, no holds barred, and she couldn’t do it until she could give him all of herself.  Spike was there – everything that he was, he gave willingly to her.  Until she could give that back to him, she had to move slowly.  After tonight, this intimacy would fade into the shadows of memory, this they both understood, but she would find her way back, and he would wait for her.  Not forever, but she didn’t need forever.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

In response, Spike touched his lips to hers again, drawing her into a slow, tender kiss.  When they parted, he cradled her head and she buried her face into his neck, willing her tears to subside. 

“Don’t think about tomorrow,” Spike requested, combing his fingers through her hair.  “Just be here with me tonight.”

“Okay.”

Spike touched his cheek to the side of her head, his mouth close to her ear.  Buffy noticed that he continued to breathe in perfect timing with her own respirations, and wondered, amidst the shivers caused by the tickle of air into her ear, if he knew he was doing it that way.

“I’m not goin’ anywhere,” he murmured, voice vibrating in her ear more potently than his breath.  “An’ I’m not giving up.”

“Don’t,” Buffy agreed.  “You can’t let me forget.”

“Trust me, love,” he replied, tongue darting out to lick the lobe.  “You’ll have to stake me to get rid of me.”

“No staking,” Buffy corrected, lifting her head and inhaling sharply as he began nibbling.  “But . . . mmmm, more of that.”

Spike chuckled around the flesh in his mouth.  “My slayer likes being bitten,” he teased, now biting softly along the line of her jaw.

“Only by her vampire,” Buffy answered, feeling once again both breathless and lightheaded, with a healthy dose of tachycardia thrown in on the side.  Spike hesitated a moment and Buffy chuckled.  “That’s you , Spike.”

Spike nipped playfully at her chin, and then the tip of her nose.  “A fella could get used to hearin’ that,” he decided, grinning at her, and immediately wincing as the expression tugged at the cuts on his face.

Buffy furrowed her brow with concern, touching a finger tentatively to the wound below his mouth.  Spike had put aside the discomfort to kiss her, but the enthusiasm of those same kisses had clearly aggravated the abrasions.  None of them were terribly serious, and they had started to heal already.  However, what they lacked in severity, they accounted for in quantity, slowing the healing process with numerous injuries to tend and leaving even Spike hard pressed to ignore the pain.  Pig’s blood, though it sustained him in unlife, hardly matched human blood for fuelling his vampiric healing.

The idea had occurred to Buffy earlier, at first on her way to the butcher shop, but she’d rejected it before her brain could fully form the thoughts.  It had returned to her mind, albeit still negatively, when Spike devoured the first bag of blood.  She’d thought of it again when his lips first touched her neck, but his actions at the time quickly overshadowed the budding inspiration.  Now, looking into his torn face, the proposition returned to her with a more plausible feeling to it.

A mental warning bell sounded, bringing to the forefront of her consciousness memories of the aftermath of the last time she’d offered what she was considering now.  That situation, she reminded herself, was very different to the present.  She had given Angel her neck out of desperation to save him, and he’d been so far under the effects of the poison that he hadn’t been able to control himself. 

Spike wasn’t poisoned, wasn’t delirious, and he wasn’t starving.  He was, however, injured because of something he had done for her.  Tonight wasn’t about life and death; it was about connecting.  It was about trust.  It was about showing him that she understood the depth of what he had done for her, and that she was willing to do the same for him.  It could only be blood.  Nothing else she could offer him would hold the same meaning.

Spike cocked his head to the side and regarded her searchingly, and Buffy realized she had spent more time than she intended staring at him in contemplation. 

“You’ll heal faster with human blood, right?” she asked, before she could talk herself out of it.

If Spike could have narrowed his eyes at her, Buffy was certain he would have.  The swelling rendered the expression into more of a near-sighted, one-eyed squint that would have been funny had her thoughts not dwelled on a serious topic.  “Now, don’t go raidin’ the blood bank on my account,” he replied, seemingly in jest but with a hint of caution.

“No,” Buffy corrected, playing along for the moment.  “I meant fresh blood, as in, mine .”

Spike sighed, shifting her back slightly so he could see her face better.  “Buffy—”

“Not like you’d need a lot, after all the pig you ate,” she continued, ignoring his discomfiture in the hopes that he might miss her own nervousness at what she was offering.

He eased her back even more.  “Buffy—”

She trundled on obstinately, joining her hands behind his neck to prevent him shifting her completely out of his lap.  “And slayer blood’s gotta be better than plain old human, right?”

His sigh this time ended with a low growl.  “You don’t—”

“Really do,” she interrupted, as emphatic in her insistence as she could manage. 

Spike scowled.  “Chip.”

Buffy leaned forward to plant a quick peck on his lips.  “Someone who kisses like you do can surely figure out how to bite without pain and yes I really did just suggest that.” 

She felt her cheeks start to burn as Spike’s lip curled up very slightly at the comment.  When he replied, however, his tone remained businesslike.  “Touched.  But I—”

“If I let you, I bet it won’t even fire.”

Spike’s expression grew slightly irritated.  “All well and good,” he responded, tapping at his temple with two fingers, “when it’s not your noggin on the line.”

“If I let you bite me, then you’re not intending to hurt me,” Buffy elaborated, affecting her best cheery voice.  “It’s like, chip psych 101.”

Another scowl twisted his features and he made the squinting face at her again.  “Fine,” he grumbled.  “Use logic, or psychology, or whatever the hell that was.”

Now Buffy felt herself scowling at him, frustration flaring over his continued stubbornness.  “How is it that I’m actually having to convince you?”

This curled his lip into a hint of a smirk.  “Partly I just like arguing with you,” Spike admitted, joining his hands again at the small of her back.  “An’ just makin’ sure that you’re sure.”

Buffy looked into his eye directly.  “I’m sure, Spike.”

Spike returned her look expectantly.  “Are you gonna be as sure in the morning?”

Her bottom lip poked out rebelliously and her scowl upgraded into a glower.  “God, it’s not like I’m under the influence or anything.”

“Runnin’ pretty high on endorphins, love,” Spike corrected, leaning in to nip at her pouting lip.

That he should bite her, while trying to talk her out of letting him bite her, did nothing to reduce Buffy’s growing aggravation, though the action itself resulted in a rush of those aforementioned chemicals.  “If that means what I think it means . . . okay, yeah, but it doesn’t make me any less sure.”

Spike trailed his fingers up and down the column of her neck.  “They’re gonna see it.”

“Who said neck?” Buffy countered, though she hadn’t considered anything else.

“It’s neck or nothing.”

“Hair,” she answered, a hint of a smile on her lips as she demonstrated.  “Slayer healing.”

“Might hurt.”

“I’ll deal.”

Spike pushed her hair back again.  “They’re still gonna see it.”

“I don’t care,” Buffy replied, defiantly.

For a long moment, the two of them stared quietly at each other.  Spike seemed to be searching her face for something, and Buffy willed him to understand her intentions.  If she had to, she could maybe try to explain it, but it would simply be better if he got it without her words getting in the way.  He spent so much time in silent appraisal that she began to fear he would misunderstand and reject her offer.  Then, slowly, he nodded.

“All right, Buffy.”

A bright smile stole over her face.  “Really?”

Spike grinned in response.  “Yes, you ninny.”

Apprehension descended upon her instantly with the knowledge that they were actually going to do this.  She wasn’t going to rescind her offer; what this would mean to Spike, and to them , was more important than a bit of discomfort.  However, her past experiences with biting had been terribly painful, almost fatal, and so naturally the thought of giving an all-access pass to another vampire made her gut squirm and her common sense cry out in alarm.  She’d have been more concerned if she didn’t feel that way.  Strangely, this also seemed to alleviate some of Spike’s reluctance, and he smiled softly.

“I do get it, Buffy,” he told her, and she could see that he did.  “Thank you.”

He was tracing the contours of her face with his fingers, and Buffy let her eyes fall shut.  “How . . . how do we do this?”

“Gently,” he assured her, kissing her forehead.  “Get up for a sec.”

Buffy slid off his lap and stood while Spike repositioned himself, moving stiffly, against the back of the couch.  He leaned back into it and held out his arms.  Buffy moved toward him, and his hands found her waist.  His thumbs tucked under the hem of her shirt, brushing feather-light circles on the skin of her belly as he drew her into his lap.  The caress renewed the fluttering heat in her stomach, and settling against his erection again brought forth a surge of wetness between her legs.

“I think,” Spike whispered, as he moved her hair over her right shoulder, “you’re going to be surprised.”

“I’ve been bitten before,” Buffy replied, sighing softly when Spike began peppering kisses over her neck.

His answering chuckle sounded far too knowing.  “Not like this, love.”

“Like . . . ooh . . .”

The point of Spike’s tongue traced over the scars from her three previous bites, shooting unexpected but delightful tingles through her body.  Buffy gasped as the sensation washed over her, and dropped her forehead onto Spike’s shoulder.

“What . . . what are you doing?” she breathed, clutching at his arms as he continued following the contours of her scars, setting fire to her nerves as each pass of his tongue rippled heated waves over her skin.

The warmth in Spike’s rumbling laugh only added to the effect of his tongue.  “Just gettin’ you ready.”

“Yeah, but . . . oh God . . .” Buffy moaned softly as the latest flick of Spike’s tongue sent a burst of tingling heat straight to her clit.  The sensation intensified with the next pass, and Buffy released a shuddering breath.  “Ready . . . for what?”

Spike’s fingers had taken over for his tongue, and while former lacked the intensity of the latter, the attention was more than enough to keep her nerve endings sensitized.

“Nothing we haven’t already agreed upon,” he answered, voice tickling her inner ear and only adding to the incredible sensations.  “Much as I’ll regret that after you go.”

“Who says I’m leaving?”

Her words stalled his motions, fingers falling still against her neck.  “Buffy?”

The meaning he’d inferred behind her statement occurred to her immediately.  It wasn’t as though she hadn’t considered the possibility; she was both human and female and certainly well aware of what was happening between them.  As much as the idea of sex with Spike tempted her – how quickly things changed, indeed – tonight wasn’t going to be about that.  When that happened – resurrecting if at this point smacked of absurdity – it would be at a time when the words sacrifice or payment didn’t hover nearby waiting to destroy all meaning in it.  She wouldn’t have him wondering, when morning came, if she’d only slept with him out of gratitude.

“No,” she replied.  “Very much no.  I just thought . . . that I don’t want to go.”

Spike nuzzled his face into her neck, his hand sliding around to cradle the back of her head.  “Stay as long as you like.”

His tongue found her scars again and resumed its sensual caress.  Buffy sighed contentedly as the tingling ripples of sensation returned, building smoothly from where they left off and soon rendering her gasping for breath.  “God, Spike . . .” she groaned, fingers digging into his skin as she fought for control.  If she’d been standing, her knees would have given out, buckling beneath her and sending her crashing to the ground.  As it was, her entire body was trembling in not-quite-orgasmic bliss, and all he was doing was essentially kissing her neck.

“I take it nobody’s done this to you before,” he remarked casually, though she heard clearly the desire thickening his voice.

Nobody had.  Angel hadn’t stayed around after he’d bitten her, and now that she thought about it, the only time his mouth had strayed near the marks left on her by the Master was the night she’d given him her neck to save his life.  Parker, Mr. Just-Say-No-to-Extra-Curricular-Activities, beyond his initial query about the scars she bore during their night-to-forget, hadn’t bothered much with her neck at all.  Riley had devoutly avoided the scars, as though touching them meant subjecting himself to something tainted.  Buffy hadn’t known then, of course, the apparent power of vampire bite scars, but Riley’s pointed disdain and lack of understanding about something that was a part of her – even if she didn’t exactly harbour warm fuzzies for the Master or Dracula – had always been a sore point between them.  They never discussed it; it ended up just another issue left simmering in the background, one of many that had finally driven them apart.  That he had then gone and willingly got bitten, more than once, when her own history had so appalled him . . . it still bothered her more than she liked to consider.

“No,” Buffy answered belatedly, tilting her head further as Spike’s lips closed over the scars again.  “What . . . why . . .?”

“Funny thing about vamp bites, love,” Spike murmured.  “They don’t like to be forgotten.”

Buffy lifted her head from his shoulder to face him, hit immediately by the frank desire sparkling in his eye and the delighted little smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.  “So if I . . .” 

Instead of finishing her thought, Buffy swept her tongue over the faded marks of Drusilla’s bite.  Spike shivered beneath her, his soft moan hovering in the air around them.  Buffy smiled against his neck, and tried a few more experimental licks that resulted in a wonderful rumbling from deep in his chest.  As Buffy continued her attention to his neck, Spike’s fingers drifted beneath the edge of her shirt, moving over the muscles of her abdomen, their exploratory touches stopping just shy of her breasts.  The eternal flame burning in her belly flared at the contact, making her doubt her earlier insistence about not allowing this to go further.  When she sucked at the scar, Spike’s thumb slipped purposefully upward, brushing over her hardened nipple through the lace of her bra.  Emboldened by his vigour and her own blazing arousal, Buffy bit down on the scar hard enough to leave the impression of her teeth in his flesh.  She had expected a reaction from him, but not the barely contained growl nor the urgent thrusting of his hips as he ground himself against her.

Both thumbs circled her breasts in widening spirals and his teeth fastened over her scars, jolting the sensation through her like lightening.  With his continued nibbling and bold caresses, and the throbbing heat between her legs steadily building into a rapturous crescendo, Buffy felt her resolve slipping away like proverbial dust in the wind. 

Blunt teeth raked over the scars as the vampire pressed forward again to grind against her, the rigidness of his erection and the roughness of the denim finding her aching clit through her own thin pants.  “How sure are you . . . about that no?”

She wasn’t, not entirely, and he certainly wasn’t making it easy to refuse him a second time.  Of their own volition, her fingers found his flat nipples, alternately circling and scratching over them with her fingernails.  The reasons behind her declination, despite her body’s attempts to subdue them, niggled at her brain, urging her to slow down before they started shedding clothing.

Reluctantly, she pulled away from Spike’s talented mouth, though not far enough to stop his fingers slipping beneath her bra to pinch her nipples.  “It’s not . . . the right time . . . Spike . . .”

He couldn’t hide the disappointment that clouded his eye, nor the hint of frustration that tugged his brows into a furrow.  Buffy reached up to cup his cheek, and he turned his face into her touch, breathing raggedly, searching her face intently.  “But you want this?”

Buffy sighed and nodded rapidly, looking at him through heavy-lidded eyes.  “God yes.”

“Still no?”

“Still,” she answered, though it hurt to do so with her body thrumming with arousal and crying out for release.  “You get why . . . right?”

Spike grumbled an affirmative while he slipped his hands from beneath her shirt, setting them on her thighs, fingers twitching subtly as though he were forcing himself to keep them still.  “Don’t wanna regret it in the morning?” he guessed, sounding both resigned and crushed all at once.

“No,” Buffy insisted, shaking her head and inching back a bit to better see his face.  She laced their fingers together and squeezed his hands.  “When it happens, I want it to mean something.”

The change in Spike was instantaneous.  The passion faded from his eye, replaced in a flash with first hurt, and then the arrogance she knew he used to hide his true feelings.  He ripped his hands free from her grasp and started to push her out of his lap, when understanding flooded Buffy’s momentarily startled mind.  She gripped the back of the couch to prevent her disposal onto the floor.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, and it was enough to stop his act of shoving her away, though he continued to glare at her with barely concealed hurt.

“Funny,” he grunted.  “Sounded like you did.”

Buffy willed away her exasperation, knowing that it was entirely her fault.  She hadn’t meant to insinuate that sleeping with Spike wouldn’t mean anything to her; she had simply voiced aloud a portion of her inner monologue on the topic, forgetting that Spike wasn’t privy to the rest of it.

“I meant what I said,” she countered, “but what I said didn’t mean what you heard.”

“And what the bloody fuck is that supposed to mean?” he growled, grabbing her hips and tugging her hard against him.  “’Cause it sure sounded like tonight means nothing to you.”

“Spike, stop,” Buffy said, not trying to hide the slightly desperate tone in her voice.  “Just shut up for a minute and let me try and fix this.  You know I’m horrible with words.”

That reached him, and he released his just-shy-of-painful grip on her and tilted his head to indicate that she should continue.

“Everything I said earlier is true.  I don’t just say things like that, you know that . . . and tonight means so much more to me than I could even hope to find words for,” she began, making sure to look him in the eye as directly as she could while she spoke.  “I know you know how much I want you right now, but if you’re right, and this ends tonight, I don’t want you to think I had sex with you out of thanks or some sort of obligation.  I’m not that girl and I don’t wanna be.  When we do, there’s gonna be no doubt about what it means.”

Apparently, she’d said something right, because the anger melted away as quickly as it had appeared, and his arms tightened around her with gentle possessiveness.  “When , huh?” he queried, and off her answering nod, a hint of a smile brightened his face.

“When,” she confirmed, brushing her thumb over his lips.  “And I still want you to bite me.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Slayer,” Spike replied, kissing her thumb before leaning forward to brush her nose with his.

Buffy chuckled softly, glancing downward briefly before flashing him a smirk.  “You’re the one who’s hard.”

Spike’s amused huff tickled her neck as his teeth nipped their way back toward her scars, and he pressed the aforementioned hardness into her.  “Noticed that, did you?” he teased. 

Buffy’s responding laughter melted into a breathy moan with Spike’s first sharp bite to her scars.  “It’s kinda . . . hard not to.”

“Bloody wonderful, you are,” Spike murmured into her neck, more for his own benefit, Buffy sensed, than hers.  “Ready then, love?”

“Ready.”

Spike pulled is face away from her neck and directed her, with a finger on her chin, to look at him.  His demonic visage slipped smoothly into place.  The single yellow eye studying her should have held nothing but rage and bloodlust, but instead, respect and admiration shone through, mingled with countless other complex emotions that left no doubts in Buffy’s mind that the demon loved her just as much as the man.  Slowly, she brought her hand to his face, carefully feeling the contours of his rippled brow while his one open eye fell shut.  Buffy’s finger traveled down the outside of his eye, over his knife-sharp cheekbone to his mouth.  She dragged her index finger along the line of his bottom lip, then deliberately nicked it on a razor-sharp fang.  The resulting growl was more desirous than bloodthirsty, and Buffy’s heart thundered madly as Spike’s lips closed around her finger and sucked gently at the tiny wound.

Spike dropped his face into the right side of her neck, and Buffy held her breath, waiting.  When the only part of him to touch her was his tongue darting out to lick at the scars again, she let out the breath, wondering if he was trying to relax her so that when he did bite, she wasn’t tense.  When his fangs scraped over the old bite marks, she realized that relaxation was the last thing on his mind.  He might as well have raked his fangs over her clit for the incredible pleasure the action caused.  She clutched frantically at his arms and pressed into him as each tiny, stinging scratch ripped through her with ever-growing intensity.

“Spike . . .” she moaned, gasping as the unbelievable sensations left her trembling in his arms.  “God, what are you doing to me?”

“With any luck,” he purred, “makin’ you feel very good.”

Buffy laughed, the chuckle punctuated by frequent, sharp intakes of breath and concluded with a pleasured groan that left little doubts as to how good she felt.  She may have declined to have sex with Spike, but obviously this was going to become quite intimate anyway, and she couldn’t say that she minded. 

Spike scratched a stinging, tingling path of fire up the column of her neck, leaving behind her scars but not the sensations.  When he reached her ear, the fangs left her flesh and he blew a light stream of cool air into it.  “This side,” he whispered, tongue tracing the inner contour of her ear, “is theirs.”

He kissed his way across her throat, marking his path with miniscule scratches that barely broke the skin.  Buffy held her breath against the flood of sensation and the rush of anticipation, and Spike treated her left ear to the same caress before adding, “And this side’s mine.”

The hint of possessiveness in his tone touched the same hidden inner part of Buffy that had shattered her denial those hours ago and led her to return to Spike’s crypt.  Now not so hidden, this part of her thrummed with pleasure, thoroughly thrilled at the notion.  It had nothing at all to do with control, or being controlled; it was about belonging, and undoubtedly she belonged to Spike as much as he belonged to her.  This came to her as yet another fact she felt she somehow should have always known, neither shameful nor wrong, but rather so very, very right and positively glowing with potential. 

“Yours,” she agreed, leaning her head to the side and exposing her neck.

Gentle fingers brushed away her hair, and soft lips kissed a path downward from her ear.  When he reached his chosen spot, Spike sucked lightly at the skin and Buffy held her breath, feeling at once terrified and excited, heart pounding madly in her chest as she awaited his bite. 

Buffy gasped with the initial sharp sting as his fangs pierced her flesh and clutched harder at his arms, but as the sting faded into a pleasant burn, she relaxed her grip and dropped her head onto his shoulder.  Only his fangs had punctured her neck, and instead of the frenzied grip with his lower jaw, Spike’s lips alone fastened around the site.  The first, slow, sucking draw of blood coincided precisely with the first involuntary clenching of her inner muscles around a potent surge of sensation. 

“Oh my God . . .” she groaned, completely baffled as to how his actions at her neck could have such a powerful effect down below, but absolutely appreciative of it nonetheless.  Beneath her, Spike’s erection had grown impossibly hard, evidence of his own appreciation.

Buffy remembered Spike telling her that slayer blood was an aphrodisiac, but he’d said nothing about this.  This was unlike anything she had ever felt before, and only his fangs in her neck stopped her from throwing her head back and moaning in bliss.  The moaning happened anyway, and Spike rumbled in approval, fangs keeping the wounds open while he slowly drank.  It was painful in the same way as rough sex, Buffy thought.  It hurt some but the pleasure was greater, deepened by the hint of pain rather than dampened, and she didn’t need to touch herself to know she was dripping wet.  The ache between her legs was becoming almost too much to bear, each pull of blood surging like electricity straight to her clit.  Tentatively at first, Buffy began moving against him, her motions growing bolder as she sought the much-needed friction.

Obviously well aware of the effect of his bite, Spike’s hands found her hips and guided her motions so the bulge of his cock beneath his strained jeans struck precisely against her throbbing clit with each pass.  The pressure was building fast and powerfully, perpetuated by both the physical contact and the amazing sensation of his taking her blood.  The noises falling from her lips amidst gasping breaths mingled with Spike’s muffled groans into her neck, and their movements against each other grew more and more desperate.

The pleasure was exquisite, and Buffy’s whole body felt alive with sensation.  The points of contact between them not hampered by clothing – his fingers at her hips, her forehead on his shoulder and hands on his arms – burned with a buzzing, pulsating heat, more warmth than her body alone could produce.  Everything throbbed in time with her thundering heart and she suddenly couldn’t breathe fast enough.  She was lightheaded, bathed all over with invisible flames, trembling with need, and any moment she was going to . . .

“Oh God,” she panted, arching her hips against him.  “I’m gonna . . .”

Spike roared into her neck and slammed against her, strong fingers gripping her hips as he simultaneously pulled her hard toward him.  Buffy cried out in a strangled scream as the final, forceful thrust sent her over the edge, and the first crashing wave of her orgasm ripped through her.  Lightheadedness exploded into weightless euphoria as her body shook – sang – with blissful release.  Only Spike’s hold on her kept her in place.  She felt as though she could easily float away.

Spike’s tongue licked lovingly at the wounds on her neck as she slowly drifted back into herself, body still buzzing from the incredible intensity, twitching with tingling after-shocks spurred on by his gentle lavations.  Buffy’s chest heaved with deep, eager breaths and beneath her, Spike was breathing just as heavily.  She became aware, then, of the trembling in his hands, one slipped around behind her, the other cradling the back of her head.  Between them, wetness not entirely of her own making, and something about that knowledge left her deliriously giddy.

She smiled into his shoulder, and Spike placed a kiss over the marks he had made before resting his head against hers.  Buffy brought her left hand up and buried her fingers in his hair, and his chest rumbled with a beautifully contented sound she wanted to call purring .

“Wow,” she whispered, unable, at that moment, to find any word better suited to summing up what had happened between them.

“Bloody fantastic,” Spike replied.

They held each other for several quiet minutes, in which only the sounds of their breathing, slowly brought under control, and the soft crackling of the torches, pierced the silence of the subterranean chamber.  When Spike leaned his head back into the couch, Buffy lifted hers from his shoulder.  Back in human face, he looked about as bonelessly serene as she felt, lips turned up in a lazy, silly smile and his one open eye heavy and sparkling drunkenly with satisfaction. 

He moved his hands to cup her cheeks and kissed her softly, reverently, before breaking away to whisper, “You are so beautiful, and you don’t even know it, do you?”

She was saved from responding by another kiss, though his comment started her heart pounding all over again.  The kiss continued, moving quickly beyond the original gentle reverence, but lacking the desperation of their earlier kisses in favour of a more leisurely but equally passionate endeavour.  When they parted, Spike again smiled at her in that marginally goofy grin, though his right upper lip curled slightly in a more amused manner.  He shifted his hips, drawing Buffy’s attention to the quite literally sticky situation, and her own lip quirked as she caught onto the direction of his thoughts. 

“Got a bit of a mess, haven’t we?” he said, and she could see how hard he was trying not to plaster his face with his patented smirk.

Buffy chuckled, risking a glance downward.  “I, uh, assume you actually do own more than one pair of pants?”

He arched an eyebrow at that, but then tipped his head in the direction of the doorway.  “Assuming your legs are working,” he teased, smirking in response to her suddenly very flushed cheeks, “you’ll find ‘em in the dresser there.  And you might find us a blanket, too.”

Buffy eased herself out of his lap, discovering as she stood that, while her legs certainly worked, they felt wonderfully tremulous as she moved slowly and shakily across the room.  She quickly found the requested items and returned to sink gratefully back into the stationary softness of the couch, risking only the briefest of glances in Spike’s direction as he changed his jeans.  The highly amused vampire showed no such signs of bashfulness as Buffy tossed aside her shoes and peeled out of her own dampened pants – thank goodness she’d worn simple cotton panties – before quickly joining him beneath the blanket.

Spike shifted to lie on his right side as Buffy’s back met his chest, and he wrapped his left arm around her, tucking his hand beneath her and pulling her close.  His right arm settled beneath her neck, allowing her to pillow her head against his shoulder, then bending at the elbow to complete the embrace.  Buffy snuggled into him, drawing the blanket tightly around them both.  Suddenly completely exhausted, Buffy closed her eyes and found herself almost immediately fighting not to drift off to sleep.  An overwhelming sense of peacefulness covered her in warmth more tangible than the meagre blanket could provide.  Laughable, she would have said not three hours ago, that she could lie in the arms of her former enemy and feel safer than she ever remembered feeling before.  Part of it she could attribute to the usual, drowsy afterglow of an admittedly fabulous orgasm, but not entirely. 

She understood very little about this aspect of vampirism, hadn’t realized, in fact, that there could be more to biting than killing and feeding, though Riley’s actions now carried infinitely more significance in light of this new knowledge.  This wasn’t something council teachings had highlighted, biting for intimacy, for connection or pleasure.  She knew one thing for certain; she and Spike had shared something special, more intimate even than the mutual gratification and the actual drinking of blood, beyond definition, far greater than her expectations.  Spike had physically taken from her, but it felt to Buffy as though he had given her even more.  She had no words for it, bearing no tangible entity with which to compare, but whatever it was had deepened the growing bond between them.  Buffy’s hopes flared anew that with the light of morning, her experiences tonight would far outweigh the inevitable denial, allowing her the chance to see clearly beyond her own obstinate denial to the truths she knew in her heart.

Buffy sighed contentedly and burrowed herself deeper into Spike’s hold.  His own contentment reached her through the soft rumbling in his chest with each habitual breath he took.  Though she couldn’t be sure, without asking questions she didn’t know how to voice, how Spike felt about what had happened, his quiet peacefulness hinted that his feelings mirrored her own.

Spike nuzzled her neck and made a few quick, teasing passes with his tongue over the extremely sensitive bite, causing Buffy to shiver and Spike to tighten his arms around her.  “Goodnight, Buffy,” he whispered, kissing her temple before settling in behind her.

Buffy smiled tiredly, submitting finally to the weightlessness of pre-sleep.  She yawned and lay her hand atop his where it rested over her heart.  “Night, Spike.”

*~*

At some point during the night, Buffy had shifted her position to lie face-to-face with Spike.  She knew this immediately as she awoke, with his erection pressing into her thigh and his lips peppering kisses all over her face.  Spike knew the moment she reached wakefulness, for his lips quickly captured hers in a kiss both eager and heartbreaking.

Morning , Buffy realized, as she parted her lips, deepening the kiss that felt far too much like goodbye.

When they parted, Spike smiled weakly at her before moving slowly to sit up.  Buffy reluctantly pulled out of his embrace, her rested muscles screaming at her to stop! , lie back down and stay . . . just stay.  But she couldn’t, and they both knew it.

Buffy felt his eyes on her as she donned her soiled pants and fastened her boots, each second deepening the distance between them, though physically they were only inches apart.  He rose with her as she stood, and their eyes met, and Buffy’s knees threatened to buckle from the potency of his stare and the renewed spark of power, tapping in to the undeniable energy passing between them.  When he stepped forward, quickly despite the stiffness of his limbs, Buffy moved to meet him, her hands flattened against his chest as he gripped her arms and crashed his mouth to hers.

Fire , was Buffy’s only coherent thought, as Spike’s tongue drove past her lips with desperate fervency.  She was barely aware that they were moving, him guiding her slowly, haltingly backward, each shuffling step bringing her closer and closer to the ladder, and farther away from him.  They parted when her back met the cool concrete of the block, another blazing look passing between them as she turned to ascend into the upper level of the crypt.

Buffy extended him a hand as he came through the opening behind her.  The moment his feet found purchase, Spike used the connection to pull her to him again.  Buffy came willingly, a lump forming in her throat and her eyes misting with unshed tears as the finality of the kiss pierced through the dreamlike passion.  Morning had arrived, complete with the sunlight and shadows and all her real-world responsibilities.  Buffy felt torn between the reality of her duties and her overwhelming desire for the man in front of her, and pangs of potent, heart-wrenching grief attacked her soul.  Because she knew she had to go, out into the daylight and back to her life, where she was the Slayer and he was the demon, and Spike knew it, too.  Her tears fell with each step they took toward the door, wetting her cheeks and leaving behind their salty tang as a reminder of everything she was about to lose.

When her back hit the door, Buffy moaned a mournful sob, and tore her mouth from his to look directly into his own tearful gaze.

“Please,” she pleaded, fingers clutching at the skin of his chest, still warm from holding her through the night.  “No matter what happens, remember this . . . remember it, because I meant everything.”

“Buffy . . .” he sighed, dropping his forehead to meet hers.

“And don’t let me forget this,” Buffy added, fingers drifting to dry the tears on his face, trace the line of his lips.  “Please don’t let me forget.”

The desperation she felt when he kissed her again was nearly her undoing, but she held onto this final, parting caress, trying to tell him with her mouth everything she couldn’t say in words.  Spike opened the door, lips and tongue doing their best to burn the memory of this into her soul as he guided her slowly outside.  The light of morning touched their faces, but Spike held on, enduring a moment of hissing smoke before breaking away and drawing back into the safety of the doorway.

They stood, facing each other, just the two of them, divided by the line between light and shadow.  The line that once meant everything to Buffy.  The same line that suddenly ceased to matter.  Spike couldn’t cross it, but she knew now it was never his barrier.  It was always hers.

After a long moment, at once endless and yet over far too soon, Buffy and Spike shared a single, solemn nod.  Her vision blurred as she turned away and willed herself to start walking.  Buffy listened as she moved, but she didn’t hear the familiar sound of the crypt door creaking shut, and she knew that Spike remained in the darkened doorway, watching her walk away from him.  Away from them.  The urge to turn back was powerful, but she resisted, though each step in the direction of home twisted the stake imbedded in her heart.  If she turned back now, she wasn’t certain that she could leave again. 

She had left part of herself, her heart and her soul, behind with him, and the holes inside her that represented this splitting ached with loss, with grief.  Buffy only hoped it would be enough to sustain Spike until she could find her way back to him.  Until she could find the strength within herself to accept Spike into her existence as fully and completely as any of the others.  That time would come, maybe sooner than she realized.  Hopefully sooner than that.  But not now, and the knowledge threatened to break her in two.

As she walked away from Spike, memories flashed like a slideshow through her mind, of their night together, and the immensity of the raw, passionate love shining in his eyes as he looked at her.  Everything she thought she knew about the vampire had crumbled to dust, and she vowed, in that instant, not to forget.

The warmth of the sun touched her skin as she moved through the cemetery’s dewed grass, amongst headstones and statues that looked unfamiliar in the light of day.  Goosebumps pebbled the skin of her arms in the early morning breeze that filled the air with whispering promises of the certainty of more.  Despite her sorrow, despite the tears that streamed unchecked down her cheeks, Buffy’s lips curled up in a hint of a smile.  Because this wasn’t the end, not really.

This was just the beginning.

*~*

Chapter Four/Epilogue ~ Tellin’ All the World

*~*

Willow and Tara sent Dawn off to school that morning without a hitch, they told Buffy as she met them for lunch at the cafeteria on campus.  The three of them chitchatted through salads and milkshakes until the studious two had to head back to class.  Following lunch, Buffy attended a meeting with Dawn’s principal, who – thank God! – commended her on her efforts.  While Dawn’s attendance and grades still weren’t pristine, they were seeing an improvement.  After this positive encounter followed a not-so-lovely appointment with her mother’s lawyers, tending to loose ends and dragging up both bad memories and real fears over her frightening new level of responsibility.  A few hours of long-neglected housework chased by a brief argument over homework and a pizza shared in front of the television topped off her day.

The day smacked of such normalcy that Buffy could have kicked herself for ever thinking that his was something she wanted.  Giggling with Dawn over the preposterousness—

Oh, what a good Gilesy word!

—of the sitcoms and so-called reality programs had been fun and most definitely the best part of her day since leaving Spike’s crypt that morning.  Likewise she had very much enjoyed her lunch with the girls.  Interwoven amidst those interactions, however normal on the surface, were elements of the supernatural, of witchcraft, of slayers, of mythical keys and hellgods, and should-be-make-believe monsters.  More than ever, the truth rang clear that what she needed from life was more than normal.  Normal was synonymous with boring .  Normal was housework and meetings, day in and day out.  Even with the weight of world-saveage once again pressing persistently onto her shoulders, Buffy knew that she would be lost without the fight.  Whether that meant the demon of the day or the apocalypse of the year, this was her life.  Buffy and the Slayer weren’t different entities; the Slayer was just a part of Buffy as a whole.  She could hide that part of herself when the need arose, but she could not segregate it completely.  Normal didn’t work, because her life wasn’t .  Anything normal she brought in invariably grew less so.  Just look at Willow and Xander, and how their lives had changed simply by befriending her.

She had tried normal, all because of a mistaken belief that she not only wanted it, but needed it, and normal chewed her up and spat her out.  Normal didn’t like the taste of her.

While the thought of embarking on a relationship with another vampire – with Spike – would appall those close to her, Buffy’s heart told her it was the right choice.  That path was neither straight nor easy-going, but she had already successfully treaded the first few important steps.  Her eyes had opened and she saw him, past the hardened exterior, beyond who he was supposed to be, to who he was , who he was becoming.  The arrival of daylight failed to bring about the anticipated denial of everything she had realized during the night, and her heart pounded her elation for the fact that she was falling in love with him and that it just felt right .

The world still needed saving; Buffy’s responsibility to prevent its rending apart on the whims of a delirious, exiled god remained foremost in her mind, but rather than push aside what was happening with Spike, her gut told her that embracing it made a hell of a lot more sense, beyond merely adding one more ally to her cause.  She would hardly be jumping straight into bed with him, though the thought of it sent delicious tingles up her spine as she recalled the intensity of last night despite the tameness of their contact.  Not that tame could adequately describe any portion of the experience of Spike biting her, but knowing that just his fangs in her neck could make her feel that rapturous left her mouth watering at the prospect of more.  Temptation aside – and oh, was she tempted – proceeding slowly seemed the best plan.  Buffy would attempt to take things one day at a time, to prove to him that she believed in him and foster the budding mutual trust between them. 

That trust itself would be paramount in helping the others to accept him.  They couldn’t even begin that process until they recognized some of the truths Buffy herself hadn’t seen until last night.  By letting them see that she trusted him, giving him the chance to be a part of the group without the need to be constantly on guard, she could give Spike the opportunity to show them how far he had come from the clapping menace in the alley.  After some initial balking, Buffy felt certain they would come around, first to the notion that Spike could be a part of their group, fighting along side them, and then to the reality that he was a part of Buffy’s life.

The soft thud of a heavy book shutting snapped her out of her daydream.  Buffy realized she’d been zoning out again while Giles was talking, and flashed him an apologetic half-smile.  Giles set down the book he’d been reading and pulled his glasses off to clean them.

“How late were you out last night?” he inquired, hand and glasses settling atop the worn leather cover of the text.

“Pretty late,” Buffy admitted, figuring that her mental gaping could easily have passed for tiredness.  “Not too much with the slaying, though.  Mostly just thinking.”

“Glory’s getting uncomfortably close,” Giles agreed.

Silence fell on the unspoken agreement of this fact.  Giles rose from his chair behind the glass-fronted counter and set the book down on the other side of the cash register.  He returned to his seat with a cup of tea he’d evidently brewed while her mind had travelled elsewhere.

“I hate to admit it, but I do wonder how Spike is making out,” he remarked, blowing at the steaming liquid.  “He took quite a beating.”

Buffy recognized her opening, and though her heart fluttered erratically with nerves at the thought of doing this, she knew she needed to.  “He’s okay,” she replied quietly.  “All bruisy and hurting, but okay.”  At Giles’s raised eyebrows, she concluded, “I checked on him, when I was patrolling last night.  Brought him some blood.”

Giles paused, lips an inch away from the rim of his mug, sharp eyes regarding her with intrigue.  He waited a moment before responding neutrally, “That was generous of you.”

The question behind the words – why would you do that? – reached her as clearly as if he had actually spoken it aloud.

“No, not really,” she answered, not quite as neutrally.  “Not after what he did yesterday.”

Giles sipped at his tea, eyes never leaving her, waiting for the rest of the explanation.

“You know, he didn’t have to do it,” Buffy continued.  “By all rights, he shouldn’t have done it.  He shouldn’t have been able to do it.  But he did.”

Giles set his tea down, nodding thoughtfully.  “Shortly after he acquired the chip, I suggested to him that it might be an opportunity for him to embrace some sort of higher purpose, though he brushed me off at the time.  Perhaps he’s taken some of that to heart.”

Buffy shook her head. “Not yet, Giles, but soon.  I’ve got some insistent Slayery vibes telling me he will.”   She leaned forward in her chair, resting her elbows on the counter and closing some of the distance between them.  “We just need to give him a chance to get there.  I intend to do that.”

The teacup sat forgotten as Giles folded his arms atop the glass and studied her for a long moment before speaking.  “It sounds as though you’ve given this a lot of thought, Buffy.”

“I really have,” she answered, putting enough emphasis behind the words to prove that she meant them.  “He’s changed Giles, more than just the chip.  I just didn’t see it before.” 

“And you do now?” 

“I see him, ” she elaborated, sitting upright again in her chair.  “And you were partly right, he has taken something to heart.”

“You don’t believe-”

“I do,” she interrupted, and Giles’s mouth snapped shut as he swallowed the rest of his comment.  “Right about now, I’m ready to believe in a lot of things I never thought possible.  Spike’s one of them.  He does love me Giles, I mean, really .  It’s not just some twisted obsession he thinks is love.  It’s real , and I’m what he’s changing for, right now.”

She witnessed her Watcher’s face morph into revolving expressions, beginning with incredulous, moving through impassive to pensive and finally lighting with tentative understanding.  Giles pulled his glasses from his face to clean them, a move so automatic Buffy doubted he realized he was doing it.  He replaced them, took a sip of his tea, and nodded subtly.  “The first step, as it were?”

“Yes, exactly,” she replied, nodding quickly.  “Giles, everything I’ve learned says that demons can’t change, but most of that came from you , and most of what you know comes from books, or the Council.”  Buffy paused, waiting until Giles bobbed his head before continuing.  “But I count on my instincts, and my eyes, and my heart a whole hell of a lot more than the last two of those, and all of them are telling me that Spike has changed into somebody I can trust.” 

Giles sighed and slipped his glasses off again before slowly and deliberately blinking his eyes and tipping his head toward her.  “The Watcher in me would like to refute you in this Buffy,” he began, setting the spectacles down next to his abandoned teacup.  “But, however reluctantly, I must say that Spike’s actions yesterday were particularly remarkable.” 

The glasses returned once again to his face, this time uncleaned, and his expression shifted into contemplativeness as he took a small sip of his tea. 

“There’s a theory, posed by some of the more, shall we say, radical members of the Council, that because, unlike other forms of demons, vampires are created from humans, the potential exists for some of the humanity to linger behind in some of them after their turning,” he stated, gaze drifting away from Buffy to hover somewhere off in midair.  “I-it’s generally agreed upon that they, vampires, can vary greatly in terms of propensity for the more destructive sorts of violence – rape, torture, mass killings – but as far as actual humanity , I can’t say that I’ve ever lent that theory much credence, though considering the events of yesterday, it seems exceedingly more plausible.” 

Buffy blinked several times as Giles turned his eyes back to her.  “Is that your long wordy way of saying you agree with me?”

His mouth quirked with amusement and he gave another small nod.  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

“I’m going to trust him,” Buffy repeated, grateful that her initial endeavours had found tentative acceptance.  “I think, given half a chance, he’s going to surprise us all.”

The jingling of the doorbell tore Buffy’s attention away from Giles, and she pivoted in her chair to see Xander and Anya enter through the door.  Willow and Tara followed a few seconds later, at which time Giles moved out from behind the counter and Dawn scrambled down the ladder from the loft, abandoning her art project in favour of greeting them.  Buffy started to say something when the simultaneous back-of-her-neck tingle and the soft creak of the basement door heralded yet another arrival.

Spike crept in hesitantly, still limping significantly on his injured leg, and hovered in the open doorway.  His eyes – both of them open now – immediately found hers.  He looked somewhat better.  Most of the superficial cuts had healed, leaving behind the residual swelling and deeper bruising, but despite the improvements, he seemed completely exhausted.  He also resonated with a sort of restless anxiety, and as his searching gaze lingered on her face, Buffy realized he was both hopeful and terrified of her reaction.  She’d had an entire day to either openly consider what had happened between them, or to relegate the whole experience into her pit of denial, and Spike, tense and trembling, had risked journeying out into the night in his beaten state to find out which.

Slowly, purposefully, Buffy returned his gaze and smiled.  Almost instantly, his apprehension vanished and he smiled back.  His eyes flicked to where her fingers deliberately caressed the mark of his bite, uncovered and in plain view on the smooth skin of her neck.  Spike’s smile shifted into a knowing smirk, and Buffy’s grin widened.

“Buffy?” queried Giles.  Buffy turned to find him looking at her intently.  He cocked his head quizzically, wearing an expression of mixed curiosity and concern.  “What’s that on your neck?”

*~*

The End

~Abby