Chapter Sixty-Five




Their gazes held for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, Angel’s eyes sad and steady, Buffy’s full of confusion. She looked away first.

“So, you’re telling me this…why?” she asked in a strangled tone, as she fixed her eyes on the blank white wall opposite her. “Are you trying to convince me to go back to him?”

“No!” Angel sounded horrified. “Do you really think that’s what I’d want? To see you with Spike? Good God, Buffy. Aside from the fact that he is…well…Spike, there are a hundred reasons why you should stay away from him. Not the least of which being the same one that made me leave you. He would completely ruin any chance you have of living a remotely normal life.”

“A normal life.” She snickered. “Yeah, because right now an undead boyfriend is all that’s standing between me and normality.”

“A normal romantic life then,” he amended. “A husband and kids…all those things women want. You couldn’t have them with me and you sure as hell can’t have them with him. There’s still the issue of aging; you will and he won’t. He—”

“Angel, I’ve heard all of this before,” Buffy interrupted wearily. “Lots of times and from lots of different people. And I’m not the one who’s trying to convince you that Spike is okay without his soul. ‘Cause, I’ve got to tell you, right now he doesn’t seem to me to be. I don’t know why you’d even want to help him—”

A small, humorless bark of laughter from Angel. He rubbed his chin and looked at the floor with a grimace. “Well, I didn’t want to,” he admitted.

“Then why are you?” she asked in exasperation.

A long silence.

“I used to try to break him,” he said eventually. Buffy looked over at him sharply, but his eyes were still fixed on his shoes, his expression one of vague puzzlement, as though he were trying to figure out what he meant, himself. When he didn’t elaborate, Buffy prodded him.

“I need a little more to go on than that,” she said.

“Back then. In Europe. When we were both—” He hesitated. “Well, anyway…I tried to break him. It wasn’t anything new, really. Dru had played sire a few times before, although I have to say, she was hardly discriminating. Every once in a while, she’d come home dragging some pathetic young fledge, and I’d have to show it who was boss. You know? I’d break it because not only was it fun to torment something that much weaker than myself, it was also an easy way to torment her. It was like a game. I’d kill them when I was done…or, if they were particularly stupid, they’d get themselves killed somehow. Happened maybe a half-dozen times over the years. And then…she found Spike.”

“And he wouldn’t break?” Buffy asked softly.

A sour smile from Angel.

“He wouldn’t even bend,” he replied, a hint of grudging admiration in his tone. “Although, God knows that I tried my very best to make him. But I didn’t want to kill Spike; I liked him. He wasn’t stupid like the others, and he wasn’t weak. But he didn’t listen to me. It made me angry because I was accustomed to being obeyed. Like most predatory animals, vampires are all about dominance plays, you know. So, I’d get mean with him…do things…and his damned knees just wouldn’t buckle. No matter what I did, he’d still be just as defiant, just as cocky. It was infuriating.”

“But what does this have to do with—” she began. Angel made an impatient sound.

“When he showed up at the hotel, Buffy, he wasn’t that person anymore. He was—pleading—and I don’t—”

“You don’t what?” she pressed when his voice caught. Angel shrugged.

“I guess I just don’t like broken things anymore,” he said quietly.

Buffy could have cried at that. She might have done it but for the fact that he was looking at her again. It was bad enough that he should know all the intimate details of this sordid mess with Spike; she didn’t want him to know how badly it was affecting her. She couldn’t stand the thought of him seeing her tears.

“You’re blaming me. You’re saying it’s my fault he’s like that now; you’re saying that I broke him.”

“I’m saying that he deserves credit. Not anything else. Not anything from you, not sex or love or even understanding. But he tried to do something that I don’t think anybody has tried to do before…somebody should know about it. He wants it to be you.”

“He asked you to tell me?” Buffy asked, but he shook his head.

“No. Actually, he didn’t. The only thing he asked me for…I couldn’t give him.”

Angel had been slouching against the wall, but presently he straightened up and Buffy knew, even before he spoke, that he had said all that he had to say.

She hugged him when she said goodbye; she kissed his cheek and told him that she loved him. But even though she meant it, she marveled inwardly at how hollow it sounded, how different from the way she used to feel. For so long, he’d been the center of her universe, the object of her romantic fantasies, and the source of her heartache. She’d even fantasized about marrying him, for God’s sake. And when did all that end? When did he stop being an old lover and become an old friend?

Of course, the answer to that was simple. Angel had stopped mattering when William began to.

Yeah. And someday Spike will stop mattering when someone else shows up, she told herself firmly, as she watched Angel walk away. That’s the way it works. And Angel’s right…even if Spike could figure out how to behave himself...even if I could forgive him…we still couldn’t have a relationship. Not a lasting one. We were stupid even to try. He’ll be young and handsome forever, and I’ll—

Well, okay. She was a slayer; she would die young. That was pretty much foretold. But it hardly helped matters. She’d die and Spike would go batshit crazy…he’d torture people, knock off a few innocent blondes. After all, that was what he had done the first time he lost her and, chip or no chip, she was sure it was what he would do again. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. And was it fair to inflict that upon the world?

Once Angel was safely ensconced in the elevator at the end of the hall—God, why had he even come? He just made everything worse—Buffy returned to her sister’s room. She was so lost in thought, she didn’t even realize Dawn was awake until she was halfway to her trusty armchair.

“Are you going?” Dawn croaked. Her words were faint, but they startled Buffy nonetheless. She paused, one hand extended toward the back of the chair that was still several feet out of her reach.

“Huh?”

“To talk to him.” Dawn frowned at Buffy’s look of confusion. “Spike,” she said in a clearer tone. “Angel was here—I overheard you guys talking—”

“You heard us?” Buffy echoed dumbly. “You were listening? You were supposed to be asleep!”

Dawn’s right shoulder twitched in a weak imitation of a shrug. “Yeah, well. If you don’t want people to overhear you, don’t leave the door half-open when you leave the room. And don’t shout. You woke me up, yelling at Angel about claims.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Buffy began, but Dawn cut her off.

“So, are you going?” she persisted. “Will you forgive him now?”

“Forgive him?”

Dawn nodded. “I heard what Angel said about souls…how it doesn’t really matter that Spike doesn’t have one. I could’ve told you that.”

“First off, Angel did not say that it doesn’t matter that Spike has no soul. He said—”

“He said that the fact that Spike wants one is good enough,” interrupted Dawn, “and don’t try to pretend otherwise.” She coughed and added sarcastically, “I might be injured and kind of high, but that doesn’t mean I’m deaf.”

“Did you also hear him say that Spike will never know the difference between right and wrong?” Buffy demanded, her temper finally giving way, fueling a sense of opposition that she might not have felt otherwise. “Dawn, finding out that Spike asked Angel for help doesn’t just automatically make everything okay… it doesn’t change the fact that he’s got the moral compass of a five-year-old.”

“So what? He’s still sorry for what he did. That’s all that matters.”

“Not to me it isn’t! God!” Buffy wheeled around and began pacing the narrow length of the room, talking all the while, although her words seemed directed as much at herself as her little sister. “Do you get what life is like, being with someone like that?” she demanded. “Having to always play the conscience? I might as well spend the rest of my life taking care of a child.”

“But you haven’t been playing his conscience,” Dawn argued hoarsely. “If you had, maybe he could’ve learned something.” She struggled to sit up but could do little more than raise her head from her pillow. Still, her voice was stronger when she added, “You admitted that you knew all along where the money was coming from. And you had to have known that he wasn’t getting it from playing poker. Not that much money. But you never even stopped to question it.”

“And it was stupid of me! I should’ve known he’d be doing something evil—”

“It wasn’t evil,” Dawn retorted.

“Well, it wasn’t good! Aside from the fact that what he was doing basically amounted to international arms dealing, he also almost got you killed.”

“Yeah, he did,” answered Dawn, “and I forgive him for that. Why can’t you?”

“Because it isn’t that simple.”

“It is simple. He was doing it for you, Buffy. Maybe he was being stupid and dangerous…but he was doing it because he loves you.”

“And that’s part of the whole problem; he thinks that justifies it. He thinks that he can do things like this and then be forgiven for them because he did it out of love—”

“Oh, he definitely doesn’t think that he’ll be forgiven.” Dawn’s voice, though low, held enough scorn to make her sister wince. “Why do you think he starved himself for the past few months? Why do you think he’s been so miserable? You had this perfect image in your head of what he was supposed to be, and he knew there was no way he could live up to it.”

“Well, he sure wasn’t trying too hard.”

The unfairness of this statement made Dawn kick at the bedclothes in frustration.

“Forget the money-making scheme for a second. You behaved like it was a federal case if he so much as laughed at the wrong scene in a movie!”

“He treated The Last House on the Left like it was a comedy,” Buffy began defensively. Dawn interrupted her with a snort.

“So what? I’ve also seen him get teary-eyed when the mother deer gets shot in Bambi. It’s not like his laughing meant that he doesn’t have feelings…or that he was going to go out and kill people like the characters in the movie. Maybe if you’d listened to him, you’d know that. But you wouldn’t even let him talk about his past. Whenever he tried, you’d tell him to shut up—”

“Yeah, when he was talking about it to you. He had no business telling you those kinds of stories—”

“He wanted to talk to you!” Dawn snapped. “Your memories haven’t changed since you traveled back in time, and he wanted you to know everything he’d done to you so that you could forgive him for it. He wanted to be forgiven. But he was afraid to tell you in case something happened differently than before. In case he was worse than you remembered. He was afraid that you’d hate him for it.”

“So, it’s my fault that he didn’t tell me,” Buffy answered bitterly. “And it’s my fault he started working for a psychopath to earn money…it’s my fault he lied about it and nearly got you killed. Everything’s my fault and none of it is his, right?”

Dawn dropped back against her pillow, looking pale and exhausted after her tirade. She stared at Buffy from under heavy lids, one corner of her mouth twisted in an unpleasant smile.

“No. As a matter of fact, a lot of what happened is his fault,” she said. “The difference is that between the two of you, Spike is actually willing to admit he was wrong. He’s trying to find a way to fix it.”

Buffy sighed heavily, pausing at the foot of Dawn’s bed and looking at her sister with narrowed eyes. “All right. Let’s look at it another way, then. Let’s say that Angel is right and Spike’s soul wouldn’t change him in any significant way. That doesn’t mean that, as a vampire, he’s safe to have a relationship with; it means that, as the man he used to be, he wasn’t.”

Dawn rolled her eyes.

“Oh, so now you’re saying that you don’t think he was capable of love even when he was a human?”

“I’m not saying that,” Buffy insisted. “But what I am saying is…Dawn, you didn’t know him back then. He was so lonely, so starved for affection…he probably would have attached himself to anyone willing to show him a little bit of attention. When we became involved, he got so paranoid he couldn’t stand for me to be in a different room than him…he told the servants not to let me out of the house by myself. He hardly let me out of his sight. It was love…I don’t doubt that…but does it sound healthy to you?”

“Drusilla showed him plenty of attention in the hundred years after that,” Dawn bit back. “And it didn’t make any difference. He thought you were dead, but he still loved you. Not her.”

“Dawn—”

“Why don’t you just quit lying to yourself and admit it? You don’t want him anymore. That’s what all this is about. Things got rough and you aren’t willing to stick it out; you’re looking for any excuse to bail.”

Buffy’s hand itched to slap her sister for that, and she quickly clenched it into a fist at her side. She had to close her eyes and count to ten before she could bring herself to answer in a tone that was not a scream.

“I’m not the one who wrecked things, Dawn. I may have made mistakes, but I wanted things to work out. I tried to make them work out. I loved him.”

“And now you don’t?” challenged Dawn. “Is that it? He screws up once and all of a sudden it’s over…you don’t care about him anymore?”

Buffy nodded a slow, pained nod, and Dawn made a sound of disgust. She couldn’t turn her back on her sister—the tangle of monitoring wires and IV lines limited her movement—but she rolled her head to one side and focused her angry stare on the machinery beside her bed.

“I think you’re a liar,” she muttered. Buffy swallowed, picking at the layer of polish on her thumbnail.

“And what makes you think that?” she asked eventually.

“Because if you really thought things were over between you and Spike…if you’d really stopped caring about him…you wouldn’t still be wearing the bracelet he gave you.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




“Maybe we should just send her back,” Willow sighed. Although she didn’t look over at him, she could sense Xander’s body tensing, his attention divided between her and the road as he navigated his car through the early morning traffic. A quick glance in the rearview mirror showed Tara hunched in the backseat, her eyes tired and her skin sallow in the oyster-gray light of impending dawn that filtered through the sunroof. None of them had slept well the night before.

“Honey,” Tara began gently. “You know we can’t do that, not even if we could be certain of performing such a complicated spell correctly.”

“Yeah. Just think about what would happen to us and to Dawn, if you sent Buffy away. We’d be without a slayer and she’d be—” Xander paused, trying to work out something in his head. “Well, no one can accuse me of being a fan of Spike,” he said finally. “But something tells me that Buffy’s preventing his turning would mess things up for everyone concerned. I’ve seen Back to the Future enough times to know a thing or two about paradoxes and the hazards of time travel.”

Willow bit her lip. “It might not cause a paradox though,” she said. “It didn’t cause one before, and God knows she was changing the past plenty then.”

“Not enough to be of harm, obviously. After all, Spike still became a vampire.” There was a silence and then Tara said, a little more firmly, “Regardless, it wouldn’t be right, Willow. She doesn’t belong there.”

“I know,” answered Willow impatiently. “I know. It’s just that it’s all our fault. If we hadn’t cast that spell, she would’ve never gone back in time. She wouldn’t have come back miserable and in love with—him. None of this would have happened.”

“Still, you got rid of Glory. You probably saved Dawn’s life that night,” Xander pointed out. But Willow refused to be comforted by his words, or by the hand he placed on her shoulder a moment later.

“And I created the situation that nearly got her killed two days ago,” she muttered.

“Don’t blame yourself for that; you’re not responsible for Spike’s stupidity. Maybe your spell went a little haywire and Buffy suffered because of it…but that doesn’t mean that everything that came afterward is your fault. You were trying to help; you had the best intentions—”

“So did Spike.”

Xander’s hand slid from her shoulder. Willow half-expected for him to object to her words, to argue. Instead, he merely looked thoughtful.

“What would you have done?” she asked suddenly. But he was now in the process of trying to parallel park, and it took him a moment to answer.

“What would I have done about what?” he asked, as he cut the engine.

“If it was Anya. If she’d done something like that to make money…but if she’d done it to help you. What would you have done?”

“Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about her doing something like that,” he answered with false lightness. “D’Hoffryn took away all her powers and she’s not one to get her hands dirty.”

“But if she did…”

“If she did, then I don’t know what I would do.” Xander slid out of the car and motioned for the girls to follow his lead so that he could lock the doors.

“Would you still love her?”

“Would you?” he countered. “I mean, if it were Tara—” he motioned to the witch almost apologetically “—and she almost got someone you love killed. Would you still want to be with her?”

Willow thought about it as they crossed the nearly empty hospital parking lot, but it wasn’t until they reached the elevator inside the lobby that she found her answer.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I would.”

Xander jabbed a button on the control panel and leaned against the wall as the elevator doors slid shut. “And you think that Buffy would as well,” he guessed. “That’s why you want to send her back. So that she can still have him without having to feel guilty about it.”

“I know I can’t really send her back. I just…I feel so bad for them…”

“For them?” he echoed disbelievingly. “You mean you feel sorry for him, after all that he’s done?”

“Don’t you?”

“No. Why should I? He hates me.”

“He’s still a human being—” She paused. “Well, okay. Maybe he’s not. But, uh, he still has feelings. And, Xander, if you’d seen him when he was in the hallway, waiting to hear if Dawn was okay, you’d feel sorry for him, too. You wouldn’t be able to help it.”

“He also hates you,” Xander added. But there was no real venom in his tone.

“He probably does,” Willow agreed as the elevator doors slid open. She followed Xander out into the hallway.

“Regardless, it couldn’t have been easy for Buffy, having to hear everyone badmouth him all the time.” Tara, trailing a distance third, spoke so quietly that the other two could barely hear her. Suddenly, Xander looked shamefaced, but before anyone could say anything else, they reached Dawn’s room.

Buffy was standing just outside the door, leaning against the wall. Although she made an effort to smile when she saw them, it was obvious she had been crying.

“This is a surprise,” she said, taking a furtive swipe at her eyes with her shirtsleeve. “I thought you guys had gone home for the night.”

“We did,” Willow answered. “It’s morning now.”

Buffy looked surprised.

“Is it really?” she asked. The dazed tone of her voice startled Willow.

“Buffy, is everything all right? Did something happen while we were gone? Is Dawn—?”

“Dawn’s fine. She’s resting.”

A quick glance through the open door told Willow that it was true, but she still felt uneasy. “Hey,” she said, cautiously coming to the point of the visit. “You’ve been stuck in this hospital for days now. How about you go home for a few hours and sleep? Xander can drive you on his way to work, and Tara and I will stay with Dawn.”

This was far from being the first time such a proposal had been made, and Willow held no hope that Buffy would accept. All their earlier offers had been rejected with a vehemence that bordered on hostility. Leave her sister to the mercy of an impersonal medical staff? Buffy had asked them incredulously. Never!

But now the disheveled blonde head was nodding in agreement.

“I need to go,” Buffy agreed. She was staring down at her wrist, fiddling with the bracelet that encircled it, pulling so hard on the gold links that the clasp strained and threatened to give way. “I need to do something,” she added vaguely.

“You need to rest,” Xander told her, looking a little alarmed. She snapped out of her stupor in an instant.

“Rest,” she repeated. “Right. I need to sleep for a few hours.” She looked at Willow and Tara. “You’ll stay with her? You’re sure you won’t leave?”

They both nodded.

“We’re skipping classes today,” Tara assured her. “We’ll be here.”

Buffy didn’t thank them; she didn’t give them any instructions or ask them any more questions. Instead, she merely jerked her head at Xander in a motion for him to follow her, and then she started down the hallway. Bemused, the two witches watched her depart.

“What do you suppose that was all about?” Tara asked, once Xander and Buffy were finally out of sight. Willow shook her head slowly.

“I’m not sure. But you can bet it has something to do with Spike.”

“It usually does,” Tara agreed, nodding sagely.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~