Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for posting this story here. I started reading it on Elysian Fields, but as I clicked for another chapter all I got was a page telling me they were moving to another server. I damn near teared up, and then I found this site, and now I'm all better!
And I gotta tell you, I love how you potray Spike. His thoughts, his actions, his voice is just so damn clear and wonderful, and just how he should be. You don't shy away from what he does, or what he's done, you shove it under your reader's noses and force us to realize that Spike isn't just misunderstood, he's not just a little sidetracked from being one of the white hats. He's done some horrific things, but in the end it just makes what he becomes that much more fantastic and heart-breaking because you make sure we understand that he had to fight against himself(and continue to do so) more than anything else.
Again, the voices! Each character has their own voice! I read Buffy's thoughts and it sounds like Buffy; I read Spike and it sounds like Spike. Willow, and Tara, and Ethan, and Giles, and everyone that we have just a little bit of background to go off of sounds like themselves. Sometimes it's subtle, and sometimes I could read a paragraph without reading any of the story before or after and know immediately who narrating. That's a wonderful ability you've got going, and just one piece of the whole thing of being a better writer than a vast amount of published authors I've read. I absolutely adore your stories, and I hope that you still get just a quarter of the satisfaction out of writing them that I do reading them.
he'd probably go around thinking he was one of the good guys and forget to kill people - and maybe she shouldn't remind him :)
Cool story idea.
really interesting start, who or what has done this, looking forward to next chapter.