Buffy told Xander everything, or at least everything she remembered, from Los Angeles sliding into a hell dimension, through the deaths of Angel and all the rest, all the way up to learning that Giles and Andrew, if not others, had conspired to keep everything from her – and worst of all, their decision to neglect mentioning that Spike had been alive the entire past year.

She was fighting tears, again, by the time she finished.  “I just – I mean,” she waved her hand helplessly, “can you imagine if you found out all of a sudden that Anya had been alive this entire time? That you could have been with her, if someone had just had the decency to tell you?”

Xander swallowed. “I kinda can imagine, yeah,” he said. “I’d rather not, though.”

“I just,” she sniffed, “I can’t help but think that maybe – maybe if I’d been there, you know? Maybe I could’ve done something, maybe they’d still be alive.”

“Buffy, hey,” said Xander softly.  “Don’t do that to yourself.  There’s no way you can blame yourself for whatever went down in Los Angeles –“

“But I do, a little,” she said in a small voice.  “I’m angry at myself, for not being there.  I’m angry at Spike for not telling me he came back – and don’t even get me started on how or why or any of that.  And I’m really, really, really angry at Giles for doing this to me.  Keeping things from me.  I thought we’d all finally outgrown that phase, you know?”

Xander sighed. “You mean the one where we love each other but we don’t trust each other enough to talk about what’s really on our minds?”

Buffy looked at him in surprise.  Smiled.  “That’s the one, yeah,” she said.  “Africa was really good for you, wasn’t it?”

“I like to think so,” said Xander, “but we’re not talking about me.”  He nudged her knee.  “I know why I acted like that – what about you?”

She wiped at her eyes, took a sip of lukewarm coffee.  “It was like – I can be the Slayer and make life-or-death decisions involving me, you, and everyone else and no one bats an eye – most of the time.  But when it’s time for me to be just Buffy, suddenly we don’t trust each other enough to think that I’ll do the right thing, or that you all will be okay with whatever I decide… God, we were so stupid.”

“Yeah,” Xander nodded.  He bit his lip for a second, then asked, “Buffy?  I know you and Spike were together, and I know we found out in the worst possible way, what with Anya and the security camera and everything, but… how long were you really with him?  Before all of that?”

“Most of that year,” she said.  She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.  “Speaking of doing things that involved me without asking first.”
“What, with Spike?”

“No,” she said.  “I mean, checking to see whether or not I really was in Hell first, before trying to bring me back.  Someone could have done that, right?”

“We really screwed that one up,“ said Xander.  “But you never would have told us that, would you?”

“Not till I was forced to, no,” she agreed.  “Stupid spell.  You were all trying so hard and I didn’t want to disappoint you –“

“Hold the phone,” said Xander.  “You died.  You died, Buffy.  You came back.  We were ecstatic just to have you with us again, and you were worried about disappointing us?  How does that work?”

Buffy thought for a minute.  “It was kind of the whole being-Buffy versus being-the-Slayer thing again, I guess,” she said slowly. “I couldn’t stop being the Slayer no matter what I did wrong, but I could lose you guys if… and I didn’t want to lose my friends, so…”

“So you didn’t say anything,” said Xander. “Even though you – God, Buff, you have to have hated us.”

“Little bit,” said Buffy.  She drew her knees up under her chin.

“So… is that why you went to Spike?”

It was Buffy’s turn to sigh.  “Maybe, I guess.  I mean, that was probably part of it.  It was like, he’s a vampire, so it’s okay if I hate him, you know?  But there was also… he just – he got it, Xan.  He got… being dead.  I mean, he’d been there himself once,” she smiled sadly.  “He could tell that I wasn’t okay, and it never felt like he was waiting for me to hurry up and just be happy again the way it felt like you guys were doing sometimes.”  She swallowed.  “Especially Willow, since she was all with the being proud of herself and couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want to celebrate with her.”

Xander winced.  “Yeah, she was kind of in trouble with the magics even then, wasn’t she?”

Buffy shrugged.  “At the time I didn’t know, and I really didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything, and Spike helped with that, too. He was,” she closed her eyes, braced herself, “for a long time after I came back I was just… numb.  I didn’t want to be alive, I wanted… and Spike was the only person I could feel anything with.  So I used him. Physically.  I used him so badly. But it was the only way I could – God, I can’t make any sense of it even now.”

“You’re doing fine from over here,” said Xander.  “You hated us, but you couldn’t let yourself; you kinda hated him and that was okay, so you could just… he was your no-pressure guy, am I right?”

Buffy tipped her head in thought.  “Yeah, kinda,” she said slowly.  “But then there was – he said he loved me.  He let me be horrible to him, because he could tell somehow that… I dunno… that I needed to be horrible to someone and he could take it?  Like that made it okay.”

Xander cleared his throat, “Okay, not a girl here, and it’s not like I want to know, but I’m guessing the sex was –“  He cleared his throat again.  “Um, you said he helped you feel… things… when you were numb.  I mean… okay, seriously, please shut me up.”

She smiled. “I’ll just say yes and save us both the terminal embarrassment.”

“Thank you. Really, thank you.”  They grinned at each other for a minute, then Buffy sighed.

“There’s something else I need to explain,” she said.  “You need to know this, okay?”

“Okay…” He shifted on the couch.

“So, that whole year was a mess, right? With me hating life, hating myself, going to him, using him to feel alive inside…” She laughed bitterly.  “He was a soulless, undead creature and he was more alive than I was that whole time,” she said.  “And there was me, telling him what we were doing was horrible and that he was horrible, and disgusting, and we could never do it again – and then I’d turn right around and run on back to him, sometimes the same damn day.”  She looked up at her friend, chewing on her lip.  “You know that whole, ‘she says no but she means yes’ thing that some of the really skanky hos would pull in high school?”

Xander nodded.

“I did that to him pretty much nonstop,” she said.  “And then I finally started to come back to life for real, and I tried to break it off with him, for real, and… he figured I was just telling him more of the same.”

Xander sat up. “You’re talking about the time he –“

“He was drunk when he came over,” she said. “And he didn’t get it.  He really thought I would come back to him if...  He told me he knew I felt something – and looking back on it now, I probably did and either I didn’t realize, or I just couldn’t admit it.  He always could see me better than I saw myself.  Anyway, he… yeah.  He told me he could prove I felt something, he was going to make me…”

“Buffy,” said Xander.

She swallowed tears.  “I don’t want to remember him like that,” she whispered.  “I just need you to understand why I don’t blame him, why I could forgive him and let him back in after that.”

“I think I understand,” he said eventually.  “But I’m guessing the soul helped, too, right?”

”Soul was a convenient excuse,” she said. “I mean, think about it.  Who would be insane enough to change themselves that much, to go to those lengths to prove to me he loved me?  To prove that he would never try to hurt me like that again?”  She looked into her mug.  “Sometimes I feel like I broke him.  Like I drove him that crazy before he went and got his soul back, instead of the soul making him crazy after he came back to us.”

“Came back to you,” said Xander.

“Yeah,” said Buffy.

“I couldn’t let myself see it then, but you – at the end there, you really did love him, didn’t you?”

Tears rolled down Buffy’s cheeks.  “Yes. I did.”  She sniffed.  “I think I still do.  Only it’s too late now.”

---

 
The first thing Spike noticed as he came around was that special kind of headache one can only get from having a cracked skull; not an experience he’d ever wanted to repeat, but there you go.  Knowing how much it would hurt to open his eyes, he tried to put it off for as long as he could, but eventually one eyelid pried itself open – the other seemed glued shut with crusted blood – and he let himself have a look around.

He was lying on his side, barefoot and missing his coat, with dirt gritting into the side of his face and his bare arm past the sleeve of his T-shirt.  His wrists were bound with some kind of wire or cable, and his arms were bent up in front of his face; felt like his ankles were tied as well. When he tested the restraints, though, not only did the wire not budge but he felt the stab of… what were those? He’d been tied with sodding barbed wire?

He writhed his wrists together and twisted his body, ignoring the barbs piercing his skin, as he tried to break free.  The effort was useless, but it did let him feel something else… Spike tried to raise his head, but the headache pushed him back down again.  Managed to peer between his elbows down at his body, and found himself wrapped from chest to hips in old, rusty chain.

What the bleeding hell?

The second thing Spike noticed was the humming.  Somewhere behind him someone was moving about, you could almost call it bustling, and humming cheerfully to themselves as they worked.  With an effort he managed to get himself turned over.

He was lying on the floor of a shed of some kind.  Near him was an open pit that smelled of water and dead leaves, over a faint reek of death and decay. Light came from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and a fluorescent tube over one workbench.  What he could see of that workbench was covered in flower pots and bags of soil and fertilizer, while a second held rolls of gift wrap, baskets, and ribbons and tape. Garden tools hung on one wall, including more than a few knives, pruning shears and other sharp-looking nasties.

And puttering about amid all that mess… Oh, right.  Figg.

Only that didn’t make any sense.  Spike had recognized his type outside the convenience store when Figg had dropped his glamour; Indarra Lapur demons, while not too common, were generally harmless.  Left to their own devices, the vaguely sheep-like creatures tended to keep to their… flocks, maybe… plant gardens, and make baby Lapurs, and not much else.  They usually lived to about a hundred fifty years, give or take.

Maybe that was the key.  Spike thought he’d already met elderly Lapurs before this, but he was pretty sure he’d never seen one quite as old as Figg.  Certainly Figg’s horns were nearly twice as long as the ones on the oldest Lapur Spike had met, and his eyes were bleached with age to a nearly silver color instead of their usual green.  Plus he knew he’d never met a demon with hair, of any species, that actually got old enough to go gray.  That was a mortal thing, people and natural animals; demons just didn’t do that – but the coarse hair on Figg’s noggin was completely white.

“Oi, mate,” Spike called.  Too loudly.  God, his head hurt… he lowered his voice and tried again.  “Figg. Hey.”

The humming stopped and the demon turned to face him.  “Oh,” he beamed, “you’re awake already.  Good, good.”

“Yeah,” said Spike.  “Care to tell a fella why you’ve got us all wound about in chains and such?”  He wriggled again, but the barbed wire didn’t budge.

“Oh, never you mind about those,” said Figg.  He grunted and worked his way down to kneel by Spike’s head.  “You’ll hardly even notice them, soon enough.”  He leaned forward and patted Spike’s bound hands; his palm was callused almost as hard as his horns.  “Nice young man like you, you’ll make such good company, won’t you?  And we can wait together.”

Spike fought back a sigh.  First Drusilla, then that Slayer Dana, and now this.  How was it he always ended up with the nutters? 

“’M sure I will,” said Spike carefully. “But what is it we’re waiting for?”

“My family, of course,” said Figg.  He pulled a lump of chalk out of the pocket of his overalls and started scratching it on the floor around Spike.  “Didn’t I tell you?”

“Must’ve missed that,” he said.  He looked at Figg warily through the eye that wasn’t crusted shut.  “How’s that work, then?”

“Well, they went away, you know,” said Figg sadly, looking up from his work. “You know how it goes.  They leave, sometimes… family can be like that… but they’ll come back.  They’re my flock.”  He shifted about on his knees, went back to marking the floor with his chalk.  “My wives, and kids, and their kids… little Maglia was the last to go, but she’ll come back.  She loves her Grandpa.  Such a sweet little thing.  You’d like her.”

“I’m sure I would,” Spike said again. Even setting aside the whole bit with the wire and chain, he had a bad feeling about this. “Do you happen to know how long ago it was that she left?”

“Little Maglia?  Oh, that would have been, aught-four, aught-five, around in there somewhere I think… I’ve been waiting for awhile now, but they’ll come.”

Aught-four, thought Spike.  People didn’t use that term anymore.  “You mean, 1904?  Or was it 2004?”

Figg thought for a moment.  Blinked his greenish-silver eyes with the sideways pupils.  “Nineteen, I think.  I’m… not sure.  But she’ll come.”

It hurt too much to nod his head, but Spike tried his best to look like he was following along with the old man.  “And why did she leave you?”

“A fire,” said Figg.  “She didn’t want to, but there was… the barn caught fire.”  He was blinking faster now, and his hands twitched. “But she’ll come back.  They all will.  You’ll see. They’re good kids.  You’ll see.”

Oh, great.  His granddaughter and probably all the rest of his family “left” him – likely died – over a hundred years ago, and this bloke was old enough and senile enough that he was sure they’d come back.   How did he always end up with the nutters? For that matter, how was the old goat still around for Spike to deal with?  From what he could tell, Figg should be dead and in the ground by now, or back in his home dimension, or whatever it was that happened to the Indarra Lapurs when they were too old to go on living. 

How was Figg still alive, and what the bleeding hell was he up to?

“This… keeping you company,” said Spike slowly. “What is it that I’d be doing, exactly?”

“Oh,” said Figg. “Nothing much.”  He sat Spike up, hauling on the chain around his torso, and dragged him sideways; centering him, Spike now saw, inside what was clearly meant to be a ritual circle. “It’s just… the waiting gets hard, sometimes.  You know how it is, when they leave you.  Sometimes it’s hard to keep going.  You get… lonely.  While you wait.”  He smiled and patted Spike on the shoulder.  Spike tried not to wince.  “Nice young folks like you,” he said, “you stay here with me.  You give me strength.  So I can keep waiting for my family.”

“And how’s that work, then?” asked Spike.

“Oh, you don’t have to work,” smiled Figg.  “I’ll take care of everything.”  He hoisted himself awkwardly to his feet again, brushing dirt off his knees.  “There’s some words to say, and a circle I need to draw,” he gestured to the floor where he’d scrawled his chalk symbols, “but I’ve done all that before.  And then there’s the silk cord and the runes.  That part might hurt for a minute, but don’t you worry, it’ll pass quick as a wink.”

Spike tugged on his bonds.  The barbed wire was making his wrists bleed, and for all Figg’s apparent friendliness, he managed to hold himself just out of reach of Spike’s elbows; of course, head-butting a guy with ram’s horns on his head was out of the question even without a cracked skull.   He swallowed.

“Supposing I didn’t want to stay very long,” he said.  “What happens when it’s time for me to leave?”

Figg chuckled.  “You young people,” he said.  “People always say they can’t stay, or don’t want to help, but they always change their minds.  Once I’m done with the words for air, why, no one’s ever complained after that.”  Spike craned his neck and watched as the old demon rummaged behind the gift wrap on his workbench and pulled out a spool of red cord, and took a vicious looking little hooked knife down from the wall.  “I’m not worried,” he said. “You’ll change your mind.  You’re such a nice young man.  You’ll stay and keep me company.  You’ll see.”