Author's Notes: Thanks to Zanthinegirl girl for giving this a look-over while Kar's away. This chapter is all original, bookending the action of the episode. There are some differences from canon that aren't exposed until the next chapter, which is mostly ready and will hopefully be posted soon.

ETA: A few little fixes now that Kar's had a chance to look it over.

In our sixth installment Buffy thinks, Spike drinks, and Anya poses a question.

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Mom was going to be okay.

Buffy kept reminding herself of that. Her mother was going to be fine. She’d just fainted due to the medication and stress of going back to work so soon and the doctors wanted to keep her under observation for a few days while they worked out a better treatment strategy. In the meantime Buffy had been assured repeatedly that everything was hunky-dory. Because that was what fainting spells meant, right? Everything was super.

Mom was on to her, too. When she’d woken up the first thing she’d done was grab Buffy and pull her close and whisper, ‘Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry.’ And, Buffy knew she knew. Since then she had avoided being alone with her mother if at all possible. Being in the room when Spike made his calls, coming up from the sewers so as not to miss visiting hours, was even worse. Both of them knowing, both of them trying to get her to talk about it. She couldn’t do that to her mother. The less Mom knew about what she had lost, the better.

She was avoiding Giles too, which was probably stupid. This was obviously Giles territory. He was her Watcher and he should know if his Slayer was all malfunctiony. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why she didn’t want to tell him. Just add it to the list of things she wasn’t telling Giles anymore. It certainly wasn’t because she was worried he’d tell her to put Spike down now that he could hurt her. That was definitely not the reason. Giles already had a mountain of Buffy-issues to deal with. He didn’t need an entire range.

The stupid motorcycle stalled out again and she kicked angrily at the left pedal. The night before Halloween she had decided that if it weren’t so much fun, she’s just dump the stupid thing. But it was fun: running down the ones that tried to get away, taking them out with her crossbow while she rode. Her aim while driving was getting better too. Couldn’t do it all the time though, had to stay sharp on the close-in fighting too. Also fun.

Which was probably sick. She could hear Spike’s voice in her head, telling her how he knew she got off on it. Which was so not true. Only…she could remember how after a really good demon hunt, she and Riley would be racing back to his room like their clothes were going to burn right through their skins if they didn’t get them off. So, okay, maybe Spike was right. Or he had been right. Not anymore though. Now the fight was just a routine.

She’d been feeling better, that hollow feeling subsiding. She’d convinced herself it was just her way of readjusting to the real world. After all, it had taken Angel awhile to adjust after hell, so it made sense that she’d be a little wobbly after being ripped out of heaven. An adjustment period was needed, and then she’d be right as rain.

Except that now she knew she wasn’t. She’d just about decided that everything was really going to be okay when Spike’s chip let her know just what a lie that was. Something had been left behind. Whatever it was that made her scan as human was gone. Maybe Willow had forgotten her soul. Maybe that’s why Spike’s company was suddenly so comfy. Maybe that’s why she felt that emptiness in her chest, in her whole body, like her bones had gone hollow. Though she usually forgot about that feeling when she was verbally wrestling Spike.

She wished she had someone to talk to – someone who wasn’t vampire-shaped. She certainly couldn’t ask Willow about it, so… Tara? Maybe she could talk to Tara about it.

She parked the motorcycle and slid off to patrol Restfield on foot. She was still the Slayer; that part hadn’t gone away. The night air buzzed with that demon energy that she alone had to feel. Whatever she was now, whatever was left of her, this was still her job, her duty, her lot. Go out and fight the fight.

Was that music?

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She was avoiding him, not that he could blame her. He wished he could tell himself that it was stress over Joyce, but he knew well and good that it was the chip’s little oversight that had her spooked. Just when he’d gotten her to trust him, too. Balls! He signaled to Willy for a refill and tried futilely to think of something else.

He’d never been so glad to feel pain in his life as when he’d tapped the Little Bit. Welcome electricity had shot through his cranium and he had felt almost as much relief as pain. All the thoughts rising up had died away, all the questions… Would he feed again? Would she let him last long enough to even try?

Because he’d seen it in her eyes, horror at what had happened, at what it meant. That she wasn’t human anymore, and that she would have to kill him.

She didn’t want to kill him. That was something, wasn’t it? Hadn’t run him out of Joyce’s room either, poor woman having figured out her daughters heavenly secret and trying to enlist him in her attempts to draw Buffy out just when she was least inclined to chat with him.

He reached over the bar and just grabbed the bottle. If he drank enough, he might be able to forget about her for one blessed moment. He needed a fight, needed a fuck, needed a distraction, needed something.

Was that a Chirago demon pirouetting? Distraction found.

Later he wandered up and out, started meandering toward crypt sweet crypt when he heard the purr of a motorcycle behind him and there she was, shaking out her hair, all ‘hey.’

“Don’t grind the bloody gears, Slayer,” he grumped back at her.

She leaned on the handlebars and sighed deep. “Look, I know I’ve been Avoidy Girl lately. I just wanted you to know…” She paused and seemed to steel herself before looking him in the eye. “I know you’re not going to try to kill me, Spike.”

For some reason he found this confidence immensely irritating. “Right. Just a vampire here. No reason to want to kill the Slayer. Done it twice before, you know.” He wanted to take the words back as soon as they passed his lips.

“Fine!” she shouted, spreading her arms. “Alright! God! Okay, Spike, you are the Big Bad. Let’s fight to the death. It’ll be fun.” He tossed the near-empty bottle he was toting against a tree. Instead of shattering dramatically, it just clunked and bounced to the ground, being plastic and all. “Bravo. Can we talk like grown-ups now?” she asked.

His shoulder slumped as he approached, but he felt his confidence revive when she didn’t object to his hand covering hers. “Had one-hundred forty-seven days of you gone, Buffy. Not a situation I’m looking to recreate.”

“I know,” she agreed. “This whole chip thing though—“

“Ought to chat up ol’ Rupes about that,” he advised, rather mesmerized by the fact that she still hadn’t ripped her hand away from his.

“Probably,” she grumbled, “but he’s already in mega research mode. Something the Council asked him to do, crazy important, he said. And I don’t want to mess that up because last time the Council got mad they threatened to get him deported.”

He was desperate to cheer her up. “Giles said it was ‘crazy important’, did he?”

She smirked. “You want a ride?” Off his leer, she rolled her eyes. “Home, Spike. Do you want a ride home?”

Appropriate, wasn’t it, under the circumstances. Love’s bitch riding behind his lady love and really it was just… a little too on the nose, actually. “Thanks no. Gonna take the air.”

“Keep your eyes open, okay?” she requested. “Strange stuff going on tonight.” Suddenly his hand was caught between hers and he saw her start to rise up toward him before her eyes went wide and her hands jerked away from his. “’Night Spike,” she rushed out before revving the engine and peeling off into the night.

He threw his head back and clenched his fist. Sodding tease! He reversed direction and headed back to Willy’s. He wasn’t nearly sloshed enough. He came to regret the decision however when he pushed open the door to find the entire patronage shrieking out the lyrics to ‘Piano Man’.


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“So who was kissing?”

The others turned to stare at her like she’d said something really stupid, but she was used to that. There had been one of those uncomfortable silences where no one would admit that they were all thinking the same thing; in this case about how they’d yanked Buffy out of heaven.

She had thought it would break the tension, but instead when she repeated the question Willow just looked at her like she’d grown a second head – but she was used to that too – and asked, “What are you talking about, Anya?”

Anya willed herself not to be rude. Mustn’t be rude to Xander’s infuriating friends. All the books said so. “Weren’t you there? We just sang ‘when the curtains close on a kiss’, so who was kissing?”

Willow gave her that ‘I’m smarter than you, so I’m not listening anymore’ head-shake arm-toss thing and dragged Tara off toward UCS, but Tara waved at least and said that they would all get together in the following evening and volunteered to bring coffee. Oh goody, so they were postponing the argument about the whole revivification thing until they had time to brood about it and were caffeinated enough to discuss it for hours on end at her place of business. She couldn’t wait.

“You think someone was kissing?” Xander asked when they were home.

She brought him a beer and curled up next to him on the couch. He was getting a beer belly, which was not pleasing to her, but all the magazines said she shouldn’t nag him. “That’s what we sang,” she reminded him. “I suppose it could have been anyone. The whole town seemed to be affected.”

He sipped his beer and stared at the wall for a moment. “I knew there was something she wasn’t telling us. I kept trying to talk to her.”

She rubbed his arm. “She didn’t want to hurt you,” Anya reassured him. Unfortunately, Buffy wasn’t really very good at not hurting. Which wasn’t surprising; hurting things was her calling. Slayers very rarely had luck with relationships for a reason.

Of course, some individuals seemed to seek out situations where they could get hurt. Maybe that’s why Spike was so into Buffy. Maybe he was looking to get hurt. Vampires were generally into discomfort, and according to Hallie, Spike had been a real sad sack in his human days.

She, on the other hand, was looking for comfort and had found it. Xander abandoned his beer and pulled her closer. “I can’t really handle thinking about that right now.” He pulled a lock of her hair straight and let it curl back around his finger. “Look, about all that stuff we said, I want this to last long enough to see you get all wrinkly.”

“I was seventeen for a thousand years,” she whispered.

“One year of being seventeen was more than enough for me,” he quipped back. “Although it wasn’t a bad year, at least, parts of it didn’t completely suck…”

“I’m going to be incredibly successful, you know,” she interrupted. “I’ll be successful enough for both of us.”

He sighed. “An, you’re not in this alone. You get that, right?”

She turned in his embrace to face him. “I do know, but I’ve also seen hundreds of women abandoned or widowed or robbed of their men. I plan to be able to take care of myself if anything ever happens to you.”

His smiles could be so soft. “Nothing’s going to happen--”

She kissed him before he could say anything fate-tempting. When she was done, he gave her that grin that let her know that an orgasm session was imminent. But then his brow furrowed and he chuckled. “Crazy lady. Now you’ve got me wondering who was kissing.”

Spike and Buffy had both left the sing-along early. But she wasn’t about to point that out to Xander. “Right now, Mr. Harris, we’re kissing.”



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Pulling apart the pieces for six and seven was tough, but I think the final version holds together well. In fact, part of the reason I wanted to go ahead and post was so that I would quit picking at the chapters and could move on to Smashed and Wrecked.