Buffy felt unreal. Spike was alive. Spike was alive. Spike wasn’t dust, his soul off beyond reach in some other dimension. He was alive.

    He sure didn’t look alive. She was used to him being dead and cold, she knew he was a vampire, but he was always moving. Spike couldn’t even watch television without tapping a foot or twitching his fingers. Even when he was sleeping his breath was regular and steady, and he twitched in his dreams. There was no breath in Spike right now. There was no movement. There was nothing.

    They’d stabilized his neck and spine before moving him in the private ambulance Harmony had arranged for them. If either one of those injuries had broken through the skin, he’d have been dusted right before their eyes.

    Angel had relayed to Buffy the general history of Spike’s resurrection, starting with the pendant, going through his time as an incorporeal ghost creature, and ending with the apocalypse they’d just fought – which was a much smaller and less impressive “end of the world” than he’d been expecting, apparently. There had barely been a destruction of twenty city blocks of LA. The arrival of the slayer army had been a decided turning point, and Angel had tried to joke, saying apocalypses just weren’t what they used to be. Buffy hadn’t even cracked a smile.

    “All right,” Buffy said. They were sitting in Spike’s hospital room, Angel on the guest couch, Buffy perched tensely on a folding chair. “So that’s that part. And the reason you didn’t tell me?”

    Buffy was sure Angel was playing coy. “Tell you what?”

    If it had been Spike she’d been talking to, she’d have hit him for that. But she and Angel had never been so easy together. “My friend was alive,” she said. “For all practical purposes, at least, less than a month after the Hellmouth. And you let me grieve.”

    “He was a ghost,” Angel said, splitting hairs, as far as Buffy was concerned. “That’s not alive.”

    “I could still have talked to him! You thought that wouldn’t matter to me?” She realized she was yelling and lowered her voice. “You knew he was important to me, and you just sat there?”

    Angel looked uncomfortable, but he had to answer her glare. “I didn’t trust him.”

    “So you made that choice for me?” she barked. “Like you always made choices for me, like I can’t be trusted, either? I am not a highschool kid anymore, Angel! I’ve been through hell, and heaven, and back again, I don’t need you to play the goddamn gatekeeper for my friends!”

    “I know what Spike’s capable of,” Angel said. “Believe me, I know.”

    “You think I don’t?” Buffy said, standing up to glare down at him. “You think I don’t know what you’re capable of? I just didn’t think you’d take such pleasure in torturing me when you still had a soul!” She gestured at him expansively. “You do still have one, right? You’re not just playing at it? Because god knows, I can’t tell at this stage.”

    “You really think that of me?”

    “I really do,” Buffy said. “If my mom showed up, would you tell her to trip off back to heaven, ‘cause I wouldn’t really want to see her?”

    “That’s uncalled for.”

    “You didn’t tell me!” Buffy shouted. She pointed at the still and silent form of the vampire in the hospital bed. “Look at him, lying there, and explain to me why you didn’t tell me!”

    “I already did!” Angel said. “I didn’t trust him. I know what he can do. Just trust me, Buffy, I know this creature a lot better than you do–”

    “You don’t know Spike anymore!” Buffy said. “I don’t even know Spike properly, but I know him a damn sight better than you do. He’s had a soul for barely a year, he’s still figuring out who the hell he is! He’s changed, Angel. You really can’t see that? He was changing from the first time he came to Sunnydale. He changed from the time you lost your soul and came and took over his life again. He changed as the human blood left his system, and he stopped being an addict. He changed as he started fighting evil instead of helping it. He changed as he earned human friends, and he changed as this... this time we had together tore him up and put him together again in a hundred different ways.”

    She shook her head, trying to get him to understand. “Spike nearly died for my sister. He underwent torture for me. More than once! He turned away from Drusilla and human blood and almost everything that made him what he was, until he finally went off and basically killed himself as a vampire to become whatever the hell he was still trying to become. And you pass judgement on him, because you knew him a hundred years ago? What judgement would you pass on yourself, if you were basing it on what you were then?”

    Angel looked away.

    “Based entirely on what you are now,” Buffy told him, “I judge you as an officious, meddling manipulator who still can’t see me as anything but a sixteen year old kid. You’d think you’d have learned better when I killed you.”

    “You sound a little bitter,” Angel said gruffly.

    “I feel like I could do it again,” Buffy said, annoyed. Her anger spent she sank down into her chair and glared at him. The absurdity of the situation crept up on them both, and smiles cracked on both sides. “Seriously, Angel,” Buffy said. “What the hell were you thinking?”

    “Well, he never called you, either,” he said lamely.

    “And if he was conscious, I’d have words with him, too,” Buffy said. “But as it is, it looks like I might be too late to hear anything he might have had to say to me.” The thought stuck in her craw. “You, on the other hand, don’t get off the hook so easily. I don’t know why you thought it was okay to just let me keep hurting.” He didn’t have an answer, and she lost patience. “Would you please just tell me you were jealous, and get it over with?”

    “What makes you think I was jealous?”

    “Because you always get jealous,” she said. “You can’t have me the way you want, so you want no one else to, either. That’s fine, Angel. It’s messed up, but it’s human.” She stared at him. “Would you please just tell me the truth?”

    Angel hesitated. “I was jealous,” he admitted. His voice was almost a whisper. “I was searing with jealousy. But it’s not true that I don’t want you to...” He paused and rubbed his forehead. “It’s just not fair.”

    “Your better nature wants me happy,” Buffy said. “I know that. But you don’t always listen to that. And you’ve never trusted me to make my own choices.”

    “That’s not true, Buffy. I really know–”

    “You know what you want to know,” Buffy said. “But I’m not a kid anymore. You’re gonna have to let me go.”

    Angel’s head snapped up at that. “Let you go?” He sounded like a little boy. “You mean you... don’t love me anymore?”

    Buffy sighed, exasperated. “Angel,” she said. “I’m too mad at you to answer that question just now.” She looked up at Spike. “Now we have to figure out what to do about him. Is Wesley–”

    “Wes is dead,” Angel said quietly. “Everyone’s dead but me.”

    “And your blue goddess,” Buffy said.

    “She used to be Fred,” Angel said. “She’s dead, too.”

    He sounded immensely weary. Buffy gazed at him, sorry for him in spite of her anger. “Well. Let’s hope Spike–”

    “I do,” Angel said. “Honestly. I really do.” He shook his head. “We really don’t hate each other like we used to,” he said. “You have to believe that.”

    “Then why the hell do you both seem to hate me?”

    He reached out to try and touch her cheek. “Do you really think that?”

    She pulled away, annoyed. “You know what, Angel? Go away.”

    “Buffy–”

    “I said go away. I’m too angry to talk to you right now.”

    Even though her voice was calm and collected, Angel was hurt. Surprisingly hurt. “We really were going to tell you.”

    “When?”

    “We tried to find you in Rome one night,” Angel said. “We never really caught up to you. Andrew said you were dating the Immortal.”

    “And you believed a word Andrew said?” Buffy asked. “I was mostly in Scotland. I haven’t been dating anyone at all.”

    “Oh,” Angel said. “I’m sorry.” Last month, Angel would have been thrilled to hear this. Now... now he couldn’t get Spike’s words on the way home from that trip out of his mind.