For a soulless vampire with no moral compass, Spike was a good driver. He kept his eyes on the road, seemed to know when he could get away with speeding and when he couldn't—they never got pulled over—and his reflexes were perfect. He steered with just one hand, the other usually dangling out the open window in the slipstream of cool night air. Sometimes he smoked, or drummed the wheel along with the music on the radio.


She knew he was worried. That he was undertaking this reverse journey against his judgment. But he was content, too; he liked to drive, and a job to do for her gave him a kind of pride exceeding his usual macho.


They'd been on the reverse journey north for two nights now, hastening back up to the Mexican border. The intervening day they'd spent at the same sort of cheap motel they'd been using all along—alike in their air of poverty and rawness, and the smells, so keen to her new senses, of human life on the knife's edge.


But she hadn't had much occasion to dwell on those smells during the day just past, because she'd spent most of the time making love with Spike.


She thought of it by that word, because it wasn't like anything they'd done back in Sunnydale.


She was different. Not just in the being undead way. Not just in the being-undead-not-getting-her-out-of-the-slayage way. And not just in the still-needing-to-take-care-of-her-sister-even-though-she-was-undead-way.


She was Buffy Summers. That was the difference, because she knew she hadn't been Buffy Summers in a long time. Buffy wasn't who had crawled out of that grave on the night of the biker demons. Buffy had jumped off the tower to close the rift, but that leap had brought an end to someone who'd already been half gone weeks before her death.


And now—now—Buffy was coming back.


Spike seemed to know it, maybe before she did. She imagined there was a kind of recognition in his eyes when he looked at her close-to. Like he was seeing the girl he'd first fallen for, back when the last thing he wanted was to want the slayer like that. The girl who hadn't done anything yet to spoil his desire, because she hadn't even known about it.


That was different too—how she wanted him, and what his wanting her felt like. Before it was an imposition, an insult, a dirty little lie. Now—


"How can I feel so much like myself again at the same time I'm this ..." She didn't say thing, because he was one too.


"Happened to me," he said.


That was mid-afternoon, when they'd come to rest a while, and she found herself talking to him the way she never had yet. Lying easy beside him on the pillow, sharing a cigarette, watching the smoke skirl up to stain the low ceiling already grey with it.


"How did it happen to you?"


"Like I told you that time at the Bronze. Came into myself when I came to be a vampire. Wasn't afraid anymore, with that fear you take on as you go up through your twenties an' find out how much shite there is to life."


"How is that I'm still human? That we ... we're both still human? Most vampires aren't. I know they aren't."


"Could say the same of people. Depends what day you catch 'em, doesn't it?"


"No. I can't believe that. Yes, lots of people are bad, but demons ... they can't be equivalent. They aren't."


Spike frowned. "Well, that's so. We prey on the live ones, there's no denying that. Though not all of us kill. I used to think there were two kinds of vampires—the poncey kind, an' my kind."


"And now you're the poncey kind."


"Perforce. But there's a long an' respectable tradition of vampires an' demons who coexist, an' don't kill, unless you count killings on the financial markets. They've got other interests, so slayer doesn't meet them. Suppose the main distinction between those an' humans is you could say they're all Id. They do as they please every single time. Some may be benign enough, but they're selfish."


"Is that why you help me? For selfish reasons."


"Must be. You said so, plenty of times."


"What did you think you were going to get out of not betraying us to Glory?"


He gave her breast a gentle squeeze. "Got this, didn't I?"


The gesture, the sweetness and lack of presumption of it, made her throat tighten. "You knew then you were never going to get me. You were never ever going to get anything from me and mine. And yet you let her hurt you and you held your tongue."


"Well, we love. An' love's selfish, innit? It's exquisite, even when it's only pain. An' it's yours an' no one else's."


This was pretty stunning. "But isn't it awful, to be so hopeless, to—"


"Told you. Lost all that fear when I crossed over. Gained daring, I did, an' never looked back. In your case, maybe now your very worst has happened ... you can just get on with it now, an' not be so dark in your mind. You see you're all right."


"I'm all right." She said it to the ceiling, trying it out. Could it be that easy? She still felt it, that mysterious lightness that at first she'd taken for the end of her soul and with it, all caring and conscience. But she didn't trust it. "If I'm all right, then why ... why did you shed all those tears?"


"Ah, love. Never mind me an' my foolishness."


"No, I do mind. I mean—I don't mind, I'm interested. Not interested, I mean ... I care."


He put out the stub of the cigarette, and turned to her. "Needn't say anythin', sweet. I get you."


She reached for him, and he pulled her in close. For a minute they just stayed that way, quiet. She knew he wanted to say something else, and that whatever his boast about having lost all compunctions, he needed a space to screw up his courage. She waited, even though she was pretty sure what it would be.


He hadn't said it for a long while, and now his voice was a little hoarse, like he was expecting a smackdown, or at least an argument. She'd told him so many times that his love wasn't real, that he wasn't real.


But he went on telling it anyway. He told it now.


She listened, making her eyes soft for him to look into, and when he stopped she laid a fingertip to his lips, not a rebuke, but a caress. "I know you do. I get what it means. Thank you. Thank you for taking care of me."


Now Spike speeded up as they passed the outskirts of the last town and entered another long desert straightaway. The wind beat through her hair, and she went back over their conversation, wishing she could have given back something more than she had. She couldn't tell him she loved him—it wasn't true, not yet anyway. She'd finished their afternoon with more kisses, with a last slow grinding fuck, riding astride to give him the view he liked, hoping that somehow that and her smiles and her cries and the way she handled him would show that she devalued him no more.


It was so lopsided. She knew it, and it irked her.


Spike reached across and smoothed her whipping hair, held his hand to her head for a moment as it furled and snapped around his fingers.


"Want anything?"


"A horse would be nice."


"We'll find a horse. You find one ... use your nose. There'll be ranches comin' up in another few miles."


"I'm sorry we can't just do this forever. Driving, and ...."


"I'm not." He let his hand drop. "It's time for us both to face the music."


"None of this was your fault."


"I wouldn't let you go back there on your own."


She took his hand, and squeezed it.