Day Four – Let people know how you feel (Part A)



Like I already said, waking up equaled freaking out that morning.

It wasn’t my usual brand of freaking out, which I associated with that period of time; it was more the I’m-cuddling-with-a-vampire kind.

Spike’s legs were tangled with mine, one of my arms was pinning him against my body, and my face was buried in the crook of his neck.

I rolled away hard enough to make myself light-headed and jumped off the bed.

“Where are you going?” His voice was clear, like he’d been awake for a while.

“Home,” I replied, blinking rapidly. The sooner my eyes got used to the lack of light, the sooner I could find my way out of there. “I’m cured. I’m a new Buffy. Game over. You can stay or leave town, but I’m going home.” I knew I was hyperventilating and that it had nothing to do with being afraid of the darkness. It had everything to do with the wrongness that was me. And boy, was there wrongness. Spike had gotten to me. I’d lied to my friends, had treated my best friend like dirt, and had spent the night cuddled up with a bloodsucker. That was worse than sex. Sex was physical, it was a way of letting off steam, it was… exercise. What I’d done was—Gah!

His fingers closed around my wrist like a vice, and he pulled me back to bed before I could react. An irrational fear that he’d attack me, take advantage of me the way he hadn’t the whole time we’d slept in each other’s arms, overcame me, and I forgot all about my training as I tried to free myself by slapping and clawing at him. His grip was soon replaced by something colder, harder. A shackle.

“Spike, let me go.” What had I been thinking, agreeing to stay with him? Of course he’d turn against me. He was my natural enemy. He should be my prey, and I’d offered myself to him at my most vulnerable. “I have to… You have to let me go.” My voice wavered between being pleading and shrill. What if he didn’t unchain me? What if he didn’t let me go? What if…

“Slayer, do I have to slap you again?”

He probably did, because I didn’t feel like quieting down.

“What the bleeding hell is the matter with you? How do you go from a sleeping angel to a wailing banshee in a split second?” His hands were on my shoulders, holding me to the mattress, but he kept the length of his body from touching me. “And breathe before you answer. You’re turning blue in the face.”

“Don’t you see this is wrong? This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be the one to make me feel comfortable.” If I teared up again, I was hanging up my Slayer-credentials that very day. Seriously.

“Says who?” He opened his mouth, and I could tell he was about to launch into one of his speeches that were infuriating in how much sense they made.

I didn’t want him to make sense.

“Everyone: my friends, my watcher. All the watchers. You can’t tell me so many Brits, who’ve read billions of slaughtered trees worth of books are wrong. I should be fighting you.” I wasn’t sounding very fighty any more. I was sounding whiny. And sorry for myself. I felt like both.

“They the same wise men who say Slayers should be alone? Buffy, you’re the longest-lived of your kind—”

My snort only interrupted him momentarily.

“You were the longest-lived one even before—” I saw him grasp for the right word “—your fall.”

My fall. How perfect a term.

Spike, not privy to my self-flagellation, went on. “You wouldn’t have been that if you played by the book and had no friends. And not to toot my own horn, but I’m not your garden-variety vampire, either. You’re comfortable with me because we’ve seen each other’s worst, but we know that’s not who we really are.”

“And who are we, Spike?” I really, really wanted him to tell me. I needed to know.

He smirked and winked. “Two deeply fucked up people who have the balls to go against their nature, the brains to worry about what that will mean for them, and the hearts to say to hell with it.”

“I don’t have that,” I said.

“What? Heart? You’re full of hear—”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because I kicked him. In the balls.

I really was a bitch back then.

Needless to say, he didn’t unchain me after that, no matter how I insisted I’d only kicked him as a joke. What was worse, though, wasn’t that he wouldn’t free me, but that he wanted to talk. Sure, we’d talked lots of times, but that was usually because I felt like it or when I could just get out of there. This time it was different.

“What do you think we are?” he asked. He was sitting opposite me on the bed, a pillow on his lap. The lights were on, and his eyes wouldn’t leave my face.

“I agree with the fucked up part.” I ha-ha’d—that faker-than-fake laughter that got on my nerves when my mom did it on the phone with an acquaintance she was trying to get off the line. “We’re sorry excuses for what we represent. You think you’re in love with a Slayer, and I fuck vampires.” His face hardened at my last remark. Well, tough. It wasn’t like he was the first vampire I’d slept with; he knew that already.

“I don’t think I’m in love with you.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he tilted his head to study me even better, see into my brain if possible. “It’s funny how I’m the soulless one, but I know what I’m feeling and have come to terms with it, and you’re the Champion of good, but are scared shitless of acknowledging you fancy me and are pissed off at your posse.”

“I so don’t fancy—I want alcohol. Do you have alcohol?” I looked at the sheets, the walls, the ceiling. Anywhere but at him.

“You’re a lousy drunk,” he said, waving a hand dismissively.

“That’s why I don’t drink in public.”

He ignored me. “Lesson the Fourth: tell people how you feel about them and don’t be afraid of the consequences. Be absolutely honest.”

I didn’t have to think about it. “I despise you.”

“Be honest. I promise I’ll have Red put another forgetting spell on me if you want, after all’s said and done. Right now tell me the truth.”

I blinked at him.

His reaction was an exasperated sigh. “Okay, let’s start with someone easier. How do you feel about Harris?”

“He’s my friend,” I replied automatically. Even I could make out the defensiveness in my voice.

“That’s a feeling if I ever heard one. How do you feel about him, Buffy? Like him? Love him? Hate him?”

“I’d be sad if something bad happened to him,” I heard myself say, “but right now, I don’t feel close to him. I don’t care how his day is, how his life is, if he’s happy.” Burying my face in my hands I added, “And if I overhear him and Willow talking about how I’m not myself since I came back one more time, I’ll wring both their necks.”

“I guess that covers the Wiccan, too.” He stretched his legs and wiggled his toes. “Dawn?”

“She’s—I still feel connected to her. More than to the others. She and...” I almost said you, but caught myself. “When I’m around her I’m more Buffy-like. Not completely, I’m not all big-sis like I know I should be, like I used to be...” I couldn’t put it into words. By that time, I wanted to talk as much as Spike had said he wanted to listen. Talking about my feelings could help me make some sense.

I was mulling that over when he asked, “And me?”

“I like you, okay? I liked you before my friggin’ fall, but that was okay because you were trying to be a white-hat and a friend, and you’d helped with Glory. But now I like you as a man, and you’re not a man.” I expected some reaction there, a flinching maybe, since there had been no self-satisfied smirk when I’d admitted I liked him. He just kept staring. “You’re a vampire, Spike, and the other vampire I liked, I let myself more than like because he was strong, and he was like me, and he could be someone I could count on. But he wasn’t. And then all hell broke loose. Literally.”

My words were choked, but I wasn’t crying. It was a textbook case of a bottle-neck: things that should have been said in many different occasions were trying to spew forth and clashing against each other, clogging my throat. “I was wrong to let him in, and I’m wrong to let you in, only this time I know better. Which makes it even more wrong. It makes it stupid, and sick, and—and you don’t even have a soul! I let you in, knowing you don’t have a soul. And if you really care for me despite that, then the soul means nothing, and I’ve been wrong all along, and I’ve hurt you so much, and what does that make me?”

He was telling me something, trying to answer my question most probably, but I wasn’t listening. “And if you don’t care, and I’ve let you in already, despite trying not to, then I’ve been duped twice and gone against everything I stand for, and... and...” The hiccup was because of sobs now, sobs that bounced against Spike’s chest because he was by my side and had gathered me in his arms.

“Shhh... I’m here. I’m not going anywhere until you dust me, and for the record, you’re not wrong.” He caressed my back, but the fact that his fingers soothed me like they did only scared me more. I had let him in much too much.

“That I have no soul only means there are no surprises in store for you,” he whispered. “What you see is what you get. You’re my compass when it comes to good and evil. When I want to do something I’m not sure is right, I ask myself, will it piss Buffy off?” He chuckled. “I admit that for a while I wanted the reply to that to be yes.”

I sniffled and wiped my nose against his t-shirt. “You’re terrible.”

“I am. I’m the big bad. And you’re the great good. We balance each other out.” He lifted my face to his. “And so you see how truly evil I am, the rest of the lesson says you have to call your friends and tell them what you really think about what they’ve done to you.”

His light tone retracted nothing from the horribleness of what he’d just suggested. As far as my two best friends were concerned, I’d hated having been ripped out of heaven, but was coping. I certainly didn’t blame them, in the alternate universe that existed in their heads, and I wasn’t feeling up to correcting that. “Funny, Spike. Very funny.”

“Wasn’t meant to be. You have to tell them. If you’re ever to have them in your life the way they should be, they have to know. They deserve the chance to make amends. And I can’t believe I just said that.”

He only gave me ten minutes to compose myself before handing me my cell. I prayed its battery would be dead, but the stupid thing was more than half-charged, and the battery sign mocked me the moment I switched it on. “Can I at least tell Dawn up close?” I asked, my finger hovering over the speed-dial button.

He seemed to consider it. “Dawn knows you’re not all right,” he finally said, eyes downcast. “I had to tell her when I explained what I needed your clothes for. She wants to wear the witch’s guts for garter belts, but agrees that you have to deal with this your way. And she’s waiting to see you when your week is up.” He looked like he expected me to lash out, but I was too shocked to do anything. I was mostly shocked at the relief I felt. Dawn knew.

I called home and held my breath when Willow picked up. “Summers residence. Neither of the sisters can come to the phone right now,” she chirped.

“It’s me,” I said drily.

“Hey, how’s vacation treating you? Are you tanned yet? Xander and I staked a vampire yesterday! He didn’t even see it com—”

“I was in Heaven.” There was no way of prefacing that little tidbit, no introduction adequate. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Spike leaving the room. I knew he could hear me from the bathroom, but I appreciated the semblance of privacy he offered me.

Willow was still in Willow-land. “That good? Was it a spa? Are you back? When will you be home? I’ll cook and I need to talk to you about Tara.” Now, did I attribute her reply to denial or stupidity?

“Where you pulled me from, Wills, it was Heaven, not Hell. Remember?” My anger, my resentment, seeped out of me the moment the truth was out there hovering on the line between us. “We—I have been acting like it didn’t happen. But it did. I know I told you I’m fine, but I lied. I was done. I’d fought my fight, and I was resting, safe. Then you brought me back and every day has been torture.”

“Buffy, I thought things were better now. If I knew—”

I couldn’t let her sidetrack me with another apology or, worse, an effort to placate me. “I’m not blaming you with the logical part of my brain, but... No, I guess I am. I'm very logically upset and hurt and miserable. Nothing feels real and I'm trying to figure out my place in the world, establish my connections to things—to people—all over again."

She started crying. Typical! My problem, my pain, was all about her. “I’m sorry, Buffy. I’ll fix it, I promise. I’ll—”

“You’ll do nothing, you hear me? No. More. Magic. You can’t send me back, and I don’t want another forgetting spell. Swear you won’t try to fix this again, Willow.” The thought of her meddling more made me sick to my stomach.

She was full of eagerness. “But I can—”

“Nothing! If you want things to get back to how they were, just give me some time.”

“Okay, I won’t do anything.” She sounded more than a little dejected when she asked, “But why did you tell me if you didn’t want me to make things right?”

“Magic isn’t the only way to make things right,” I said with a sigh. “Gimme a few more days, and lemme handle this my way. I’m the Slayer; I got moves.” My joke got a half-hearted laugh out of her. “Talk soon, okay?”

“Talk soon.”

I hung up and made a mental note to call Tara and ask her to keep an eye on Willow. She’d given up way too easy and had sounded way too eager to begin with.

“Oh Spikey,” I called out, “come here and grovel for forgiveness for talking to my little sis behind my back.” Truth was, I wanted breakfast, and for the first time in ages felt like having bacon.

Taking things off my chest felt good. It was about time other people felt bad for a change.


tbc.