By the time Buffy made it home that evening, she felt like she was fraying at the seams; it was only a matter of time, she was pretty sure, before she just quietly shredded apart into a little heap of Buffy-scraps and landed on the floor, never to get up again.  She wasn’t completely certain that it’d be a bad thing if she did.

Those weird minivan-messages?  Not so much with the minivan, more with the mystical after all.

She’d gone to the Slayer Center, as planned – it had an official name, some kind of martial arts studio, but only the paying customers used it – and in between poking around the place and getting to know the rest of the staff, she’d heard from no less than four different girls that there was some guy who needed her, and that she needed to go to him. 

They’d been having dreams, some of them.  One girl who played a lot of chess in her spare time had a lot to say about the Queen, the Queen’s Knight, and how the Queen’s Bishop wasn’t moving the way he should, so she kicked him off the chessboard.  All of which would have been fine, except that another baby Slayer just had to mention that “queen’s knight” was another way of describing the queen’s champion at jousts and stuff back in the old days.

Champion.  Buffy’s stomach clenched into a tight little knot every time she so much as thought the word.

Buffy’s entire day pretty much went downhill to Suckville from there.  Between the leather duster she saw someone wearing at lunchtime, a bleach-blond punk guy she thought she saw, and yet more phrases eavesdropped or misheard to sound like “he needs you”, it felt like her usual strong-Buffy façade was being chipped apart by memories, glimpses, of Spike.

The last straw finally landed after she got back to Toledo.  She’d found her way back to Xander’s (and only got lost once, yay for Buffy), parked the car, and as she was walking up the sidewalk heard the ring of metal hitting pavement just in front of the house.  A beat-up old truck, rattling by with its bed full of mattress springs and scrap metal, had hit a bump and lost something, something that jangled and clanged its way over to the curb by the mailbox.

Buffy went to pick it up, and found herself holding a battered railroad spike.

The tears that came then were impossible to stop.  Buffy couldn’t see to get her key in the lock, so she sat on the front step weeping, fighting it and sobbing anyway, and turning the spike over and over in her hands until Xander showed up a little while later.

“Hey, I’m glad you’re home,” he said, practically jogging up the sidewalk, “I think we need… to…” He stopped short, getting a good look at her in the fading light.  “Buffy?”

She sniffed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.  “Xander,” she said, not taking her eyes off the railroad spike in her hand, “I think we need to talk.”

Xander’s eyebrows went up.  “I was just going to say the same thing,” he said.  “Um, also – are you okay? Or is that a dumb question?”

Buffy gave a soggy sort of chuckle.  “I’m – no,” she said, “I really don’t think I am.”  Something she’d never allowed herself to admit before, at least, not to any of the old Scooby gang.  Spike, on the other hand… Buffy pulled herself away from the thought before she could break down again.  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Xander’s feet freeze in place. Must have surprised him, too.

“Come on inside,” was all he said.

Xander didn’t say anything else while she cleaned up and he changed out of his work clothes.  He kept quiet while pulling leftovers out of the fridge, and ate dinner beside her without a word.  The silence could have been unnerving, but Buffy found it soothing.  It gave her time to pull herself back together again.

Finally, she started clearing the table and he put on a pot of coffee.  Glanced over his shoulder and said, “Do you want to go first, or should I?”

I’ll go,” she replied.  “Just let me find, like, two boxes of tissues first – I’ve been a mess all day, I swear.”

And then they were back on the couch and Buffy was telling him everything that happened, all about her dream, the crazy coincidences that followed her around all day, and finally she held out the railroad spike for him to look at.

“It’s like – when he died – when I thought he died, I mean, when – that first time…” she stopped, huffed out a breath.  “God, I thought I’d gone through all this once already. At the Hellmouth.  Right after that.  It seemed like I kept seeing Spike-things every time I turned around.  And I guess… at first I thought this was just more of that, you know?  But between the dreams and this thing,” she set the spike on the coffee table, “now I’m pretty sure it isn’t – more of the same, I mean.”  She finally looked up at Xander.  “I’m getting the feeling that this is less with the coincidences and more with the… the cosmic two-by-four.”

Xander took a deep breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh.  “Yeah… you aren’t going to like this,” he said.

Buffy’s eyes widened.  “Oh, don’t tell me.”

Xander just looked at her over the top of his mug.  “That two-by-four?  Yeah.  Guess what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Buffy blinked.  Blinked again.  “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

Xander shook his head.  “Nope – sorry.  See, we have this girl, a demon, who works for us on second shift.  She’s psychic – we hired her after she tried to get us to repair some fire damage that hadn’t happened yet – yeah, not relevant, sorry.”  He sipped his coffee.  “So, a couple hours ago, she showed up for work, took one look at me, and started talking about you – a lot.  She just about bullied me into inviting her over to give you a reading.  She said it was important – and she kept mentioning “he” a lot.”

Buffy put her head in her hands.

“Anyway, I told her I’d ask you if it was okay and call her back.”  He took a deep breath.  “So.  Is it okay?”

“I guess it’ll have to be,” said Buffy tiredly.  “I get the feeling saying ‘no’ will just get me smacked harder.”

“Smacked?” asked Xander.

“Cosmic two-by-four,” said Buffy.  “Really rather not see what the cosmic sledgehammer looks like.”  She sighed, fidgeted with her mug.  “The only thing I don’t get is who ‘he’ is supposed to be.  I mean, all this stuff about Spike is… great… I guess.  But Spike’s –“ she swallowed hard, forced her voice to behave.  “Spike’s… gone.” Swallowed again, took a deep breath.  “The only other ‘hims’ left in my life would be you, and Giles.  And honestly, if it’s Giles?  I’m gonna need some convincing to go help him.”

“Well, maybe this reading will show us that,” said Xander with a tentative shrug.

Buffy closed her eyes.  “It better,” she said.

---

 
Spike was adrift.

His body, or maybe it was his demon, had finally reached the point of exhaustion, and if he wasn’t quite sleeping, he was no longer truly conscious either.  Both his demon and his soul had withdrawn far inward, away from the constant signals of terror and pain coming from his tormented body.  Now the world consisted of Spike and his thoughts, and his mind floated aimlessly through whatever images his subconscious chose to dredge up for his viewing pleasure.

Pleasure. Right.

Over a century bathing in the blood of innocents – well, feeding on them, anyway – did not build up much in the way of cheerful scenery, not as far as his soul was concerned.  His demon could reminisce fondly on the things he’d done; his soul could only cringe and pray for a forgiveness to which he could never be entitled.

There were other dreams, though.  When he wasn’t dwelling on the deeds of his past, his weary mind sought refuge in memories of the Slayer.  Never mind that there were now hundreds of them around the world; for Spike there would only ever be One Chosen.  She’d believed in him during a time when he no longer knew how to believe in himself – her belief had given him strength to endure far more hateful, more personal torture than this.  His love for her had given him the strength to resist the demands of an angry Hellgod, for her sake, to protect her.

The ordeal he faced now wasn’t founded in hatred, wasn’t about tempting him away from the good, wasn’t even about him at all.  He couldn’t decide whether that made it easier to bear, or harder.

Didn’t matter, though; he would endure, because that was what Spike did.  Adapt to circumstances where he could, endure them where he couldn’t.  Make it out the other side, full of piss and vinegar and ready to take on the world again, just for the challenge of it.

Even so, Spike couldn’t help but wonder, distantly, if Buffy still would believe in him today, worn and weary as he was after grinding through a year at Angel’s side.  For all intents and purposes he’d worked for Evil, Incorporated – even been their property for a little while, before he’d got his body back.  Would she still see goodness inside him?  Could she?  He thought probably not.  Not that it mattered; far as she knew he’d died the final death in Sunnydale, never to return.   There wasn’t anything left of him for her to believe in, dead and dusted like that, was there?

He floated through image after image of her, smiling, angry, naked in his bed, threatening to stake him, fighting by his side.  God, she was beautiful.  He longed for her, just to see her again, to know she was happy and moving on with her life.  He wouldn’t interfere; wouldn’t even show her he still existed, wouldn’t inflict himself on her world like that.

Not that he could, just at the moment.

Don’t think of that, he warned himself.  Spike mentally gritted his teeth, fighting to stay below the surface, away from the pain, for just a little longer.

Adapt or endure, Willy old boy.  Adapt or endure.  He would endure this, he decided, for her.  He would come out the other side, full of piss and vinegar, just so he could find Buffy afterward and know for certain that she was all right.

Endure it, William, he thought.  For her.

---

 
Buffy found herself strangely nervous upon meeting Xander’s employee; it had been a long time, she realized, since she’d been face-to-face with someone who was so obviously a demon, without it trying to kill her.  Or vice versa, she thought with a wince.

The demon called herself Tser Moduce, and insisted for some reason on spelling it for Buffy: Zer Moduz.  She wasn’t much bigger than a fifth-grader, and with her magic necklace on, the illusion it carried made her look not much older than one.  Once she took off the amulet, though, she had shimmering, scaly indigo-blue skin, large eyes that reflected orange from the table lamp by the couch, and “hair” made out of elongated scales in white and ice-blue that clicked against each other whenever she moved her head.

Made her blouse and jeans look really strange on her, without the glamour on.

It helped that Moduz was obviously just as nervous to meet Buffy, although it was anyone’s guess whether that was because she was talking to The Slayer or because she was standing in her boss’s home after hours.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” she said.  The slightest lisp around tiny, pointed teeth.

“Well, you said it was important,” said Buffy.  “And… I’ve been having some weird stuff happen lately.”

The demon crinkled her eyes in amusement.  “Do not weird things happen always around the Slayer?” she asked.

Buffy shrugged.  “Weird even for me.”  She drew her knees up under her chin.  “’He needs you. Go to him.’ I’ve been getting that, over and over.  But I don’t know who ‘he’ is supposed to be.”

“Do you not?” asked Moduz, tilting her head nearly sideways.  “Your messages are not clear?”

Buffy chewed her lip, looked away. “I know who they seem to be talking about,” she hedged, “but he…  I thought he was dead a year ago, but I just found out he… died… more recently.” Gritted her teeth against the tears she was getting sick of shedding.

“And if he did not?” Tipped her head the other way.  Creepy without meaning to be.

Buffy shivered.  “Is that what you see?” she whispered.

Orange eyes blinked closed. “I am not so skilled,” she said. “My sister who in Chicago lives, she can see such things.  I only have… flashes.”  She opened her eyes, looked directly at Buffy.  “But my flashes say that he is yours, and that you know him very well.  That you love him, and that he is lost.”

“Lost,” said Buffy bitterly.  “As in dead.”

“Perhaps, but perhaps not,” Moduz said.  She paused, took a sip from the mug Xander offered.  “My flashes say also that you need one another badly. Can one who is dead still need you?” Another sip, while Buffy sat frozen. “My flashes say the most that I should read for you.  I have brought my things, my runes and cards.  Will you let me – read for you?  It can only help to know, can it not?”

Buffy took a shaky breath, let it out.  “Yeah,” she said.  “Yeah, I guess I better know for sure.”