Part Two  “So,” Joan said, still holding Randy’s hand. “That’s what Randy’s friend Clem told him.  That he was some bad-ass vamp, but he can’t hurt humans anymore and he… he loves me.”  She smiled up at Randy. “Isn’t that great, Mr. Giles?” She ignored his rolled eyes and added, “And he’s not your son, cause he’s all old and stuff – not that you aren’t old, but you’re not as old as…” She trialed off as Giles glared at her and Randy cleared his throat. 
 
Giles transferred his glare to Randy. “So, you are not ‘Randy Giles’ then. You were just wearing his clothes. I wonder why?”
 
Randy/Spike looked slightly ashamed as he admitted, “Seems like I may have something of a gambling problem – or I did, anyway.  And for some reason I owed another demon a lot of… kittens?” He shrugged. “I guess if you’re a demon, that makes sense.  Anyway, it seems I was probably trying to hide from the loan shark’s boys when I dressed like a ponce and ran to the Slayer.”  He glanced down at Joan. “Not really clear on what you had to do with the situation, love. Something about a poker game and you setting the pot free.”
 
“Well, if you were gambling for cute little kittens, I probably did set them free! That’s terrible. I’m very disappointed in you, Randy.”  She glared until he looked appropriately apologetic, then softened.  “But that’s not who you are now, is it?”
 
“No! Not at all. Must have been a holdover from my evil days, that’s all.”
 
“Speaking of which,” Giles said, moving towards the shelves that held the old Watcher’s records.  “What did you say your real name is?”
 
“His name is Randy,” Buffy said, her expression firm. “That’s who he is now. It doesn’t matter who he used to be.”
 
“Perhaps not,” Giles said diplomatically, “but it would still be useful to know more about him.”  As he pulled out a few books at random, he said, “And this ‘Clem’ person said that I am your watcher? Is that correct?”
 
“’S what he said. Joan is the Slayer and you tell her what to do.”
 
Giles looked at Joan’s darkening expression and sighed. “I’m fairly certain I do not tell her what to do… not with any success, anyway.”
 
“Damn right,” Joan muttered. 
 
Giles handed each of them a book, saying, “Shall we see if the Watcher Histories mention a ‘Spike’ or a ‘William the Bloody’?”
 
It was only a short time before Buffy raised her head, her devastated eyes fixed on Randy.  “I think I found you,” she said in a very small voice, holding out the book for him to see.  Randy’s face paled even more as he read about himself and his vampire family.  On the following page was a photograph very similar to the ones he’d found in his crypt.  Joan and Giles watched with curiosity as his eyes scanned the pages, then went back and read again more carefully. When he’d finished reading for the second time, he silently shoved the book toward Giles before standing up and moving away to stare out the window.
 
There was a movement behind him, and then Joan’s hand was on his back. When he didn’t respond, she slid both arms around him and rested her face against his leather-clad back.  “That’s not you,” she whispered. “That’s not the Randy I know.”
 
“You don’t know me,” he said, misery in every line of his body and in his voice. “Hell, I don’t know me, Joan. I’m a complete fraud.”
 
“I know you love me.”
 
“I do,” he said, turning around and tipping her chin up to face him. “And I do even when I’m myself, it seems.  But that’s not going to be enough, is it?”
 
Her face twisted in anguish. “I… I don’t know.  That’s so not you… not the Rand—Spike I know.  I don’t know what to think.”
 
“I think you should step away from him immediately,” Giles said, staring at Randy with hard eyes.  “He is clearly a very dangerous vampire.”
 
Joan stamped her foot. “Don’t tell me what to do!  We know he can’t hurt people for some reason, so even if he didn’t love me before he lost his memories—”
 
“Which I did,” he put in quickly, glaring at the man holding the book. “Clem said so. Said I’d been in love with her for a year or more. And I’ve got some sort of government chip in my brain makes it impossible for me to harm humans. It’s why I can’t hit that wanker Alex when he’s being an arse about us.”
 
Joan smiled at him, reaching for his hand before turning back to face her watcher. “So even if he didn’t love me, he still isn’t dangerous to me.  This is my decision to make.”
 
The standoff was interrupted by the arrival of Alex, Willow and Tara. The odd trio burst into the room, Willow already speaking before they stopped.  “We found stuff!  Tara and I were helping Dawn go through the house and we found a bunch of papers, and some pictures.”  She turned to smile at Joan. “We think we know who you are.  For some reason, all this stuff was boxed up in that extra bedroom where we’ve been storing things.”
 
Joan frowned. “And…?”
 
“And,” Alex said, with a dismissive glance at the vampire holding her hand. “It looks like you lived there. That’s your bedroom.” He frowned. “We can’t quite figure out why so much of your stuff was packed up, but the pictures are definitely of you, and we found a Sunnydale High yearbook.”  He grinned at Giles. “You were the school librarian,” he said.  “Imagine that – Rupert Giles surrounded by books.”  They all snorted and snickered at the older man’s expense before he interrupted them to ask, “And what did you find out about Joan?”
 
“Her name is Buffy,” Willow blurted.  “Buffy Summers. And she owns the house. She inherited—” Willow stopped when Tara laid a warning hand on her arm.
 
“Inherited?  Inherited from who?”  Buffy’s face was falling before Tara could offer her gentle explanation.
 
“It looks like your mother died sometime last year,” Tara said, sympathy and concern in both her voice and her face.  “You and Dawn live in the house, and we apparently live there too.  I guess we’re all trying to save money by living together…”
 
“And Rand–Spike? Does he live there?”
 
“We already know where I live, love,” he said, squeezing her hand.  “If you live with three other women, that explains why we don’t live together.  We may not even be dating…”
 
“We don’t know that!”
 
“I think we can make a pretty good guess,” Alex said with a sneer. “Buffy looks like the kind of girl who wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
 
“Speak for yourself, arsehole,” Randy/Spike growled, flashing some fang to add emphasis.
 
“Stop it,” Joan said, her voice so soft they almost didn’t hear her.  “Stop fighting. We have to… to stick together until we get our memories back.”
 
“What if we never do?” Tara said what they’d all been thinking.  “We’ve been getting away with pretending so far, but sooner or later we’re going to get caught out.  We need jobs, we might have families….”
 
“If we never get them back, then we’ll just….” Joan’s voice trailed off.  “I don’t know. We’ll just have to start new lives.”
 
Giles interrupted the babble of talk that followed Joan’s suggestion.  “I believe it is our best interests to learn as much about our lives before the… incident… that caused the memory loss as we can. The more we know, the more easily we can slip back into our lives.  We already know that Joan and Dawn are sisters, that Joan is a Slayer and I am her Watcher.  Randy now knows more about what he is and where he lives—”
 
“Lived!” Joan interrupted. “He lives with me now, in our apartment.”
 
“Actually…” Willow began carefully, “I think you live in the house with the rest of us. I don’t know why so much of the stuff in that room was packed up, but it looks like you were living there… just…” She shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe you just moved back home from somewhere else?”
 
“Maybe you moved out of my crypt,” Randy said quietly, dropping her hand and moving away from her. “That’s why we didn’t find much of your stuff there – you weren’t living there any more.”
 
“Maybe I was getting ready to move into an apartment,” Joan argued.  “Maybe we were getting ready to live together there – just like we are now, only some other apartment. I’ll bet that’s it. I was packing my stuff up to move out….” She trailed off as everyone stared at her.  “It could have happened,” she muttered, turning away.
 
“I suggest you go to the home you apparently shared with your sister and housemates and begin going through your belongings.   Perhaps you will learn more about your life before.”
 
“Fine,” she agreed with little enthusiasm. “Let’s go, Randy.”
 
“Shouldn’t we use his real name, now that we know it?”  Willow looked at Randy expectantly. “And yours?”
 
“I’m Joan, he’s Randy.”  Buffy’s expression allowed no room for argument, although Randy, who hated his name, did attempt it.
 
“Actually, love, ‘Spike’ suits me a bit mo—” One look from her had him swallowing the rest of his thought. “Right. Joan and Randy. That’s who we are until we remember different.  You lot need to remember that,” he added, pointing around the room.
 
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
“Wow. What a lot of stuff.” Joan gestured to the dressing table. “I guess that’s the makeup and things that I was using every day.” She peered into the closet. “I wonder why my clothes were all packed up? You’d think I would have wanted to get at them.”
 
“I don’t think you were gonna need them…” Dawn’s shaking voice preceded her through the door.  She had a small book in her hand, which was also shaking.  Joan ran to her immediately. “Dawn? What’s wrong?”
 
Shoving the book at Joan, Dawn said, “This is my diary.  I just found it under the mattress.  I think you need to read it.”
 
“You want me to read your diary?”
 
“I don’t wantyou to read it. No. But I think you need to.”  Dawn’s eyes went to Randy’s.  “You might not want to be here….” He was moving toward the door before she had finished speaking, but Joan stopped him.
 
“No. We’ll read it together. And we’ll deal.”
 
“Buf–Joan, I don’t think—” Joan stopped her with a flick of her hand. 
 
“Whatever it says, Randy and I will find out together.”
 
Dawn gave Randy a sympathetic look, then said, “Okay, but just so you know, I’m completely over it.” She flounced out of the room, glancing back over her shoulder to add, “And, Joan? You have diaries too. Somewhere in these boxes.”
 
Joan patted the floor beside her where she had settled down to read while leaning against the bed.  She waited until Randy slid down beside her, putting an arm around her shoulder and looking down at the book in her lap.  They began reading, Joan flipping quickly past the entries about mean girls in Dawn’s classes, boys she thought were cute, and the bands she was listening to that week. Every time she saw her own name, she paused and read the entry.  Even allowing for exaggeration and misunderstanding on Dawn’s part, the course of the last couple of years was sounding pretty horrific.
 
She heard Randy’s hiss of indrawn breath when Spike’s name first appeared as Dawn tried to figure out what a Gem of Amara was and why Buffy had to fight Spike for it.  He breathed a sigh of relief when he disappeared, only to tighten his arm on her when he reappeared with the chip in his head.  His steady snarls as Dawn waxed enthusiastic about Buffy’s new boyfriend didn’t end until she put the book down, holding her finger on the page that ended that school year.
 
“Well,” Joan said. “I guess we weren’t together then.  Although didn’t it say something about us being engaged?”
 
“It said it was a spell, love. Only lasted a day or so…”
 
“Well, yeah. But….”
 
“Buf–Joan, I was a stone cold killer until they put that chip in my head. Don’t try to sugarcoat it.  Don’t know why you let me live, but—”
 
She flipped the book open again and began scanning – the first few pages were typical middle-school stuff, then she found something about coming home beaten to a pulp by some other woman.  Spike’s name began showing up more and more often. It was obvious that Dawn was spending time in his crypt, although why her mother would have thought that was okay, and even gone there with her once or twice, wasn’t clear.  When Joan got to where she’d accused Dawn of having a crush on the blond vampire, Randy snorted.  “Jealous, were you?” 
 
“As if!”  She kept reading, her triumphant “Aha!” when she came to the entry that was Dawn bemoaning the fact that all Spike cared about was learning more about Buffy.  “He is soooo in love with her!” Dawn had written in purple ink. In much larger, block letters, she’d added, “It’s not fair!”
 
“So, was already in love with you way back then, was I? Told you so.”
 
“But I had a boyfriend then… Although he doesn’t sound like he’s much fun….”
 
“Maybe you weren’t lookin’ for fun, pet.  Sounds like the year wasn’t going well for you.  Safe might have been what you wanted.”
 
“Oh my God….” Buffy silently showed him the pages where Dawn learned and began to deal with having been a ball of energy until the monks hid her inside a fully human girl.  “How did they…” 
 
“Pretty powerful mojo those monks had if this is true. Inventing a whole person and then altering the memories of anybody who might come in contact with her.”
 
“Do you suppose they had anything to do us with losing our memories?”
 
“I’m sure they could’ve done it if they wanted to… but why would they? If they sent her to you for protection, taking away your memory of why she needed it makes no sense. “
 
“Well none of this makes any sense,” Buffy said as she began turning pages again. Another “aha!” followed her finding the information that Willow was a lesbian and she and Tara were a couple and had been for some time. “I knew she and Alex weren’t dating….” Her eyes grew big. “Ohmygod! What if she’s been sleeping with him? What if they—”
 
“They haven’t,” he said shortly. “The only shagging going on there is with the other witch. This just confirms what my nose has been telling me right along.”
 
Buffy continued skimming.  “Uh oh….”
 
“Never a good sign… now what?”
 
“It kind of sounds like Anya is Alex’s girlfriend. Mr. Giles is just her boss at the Magic Shop.  What are we going to do about that?  There’s definitely been ‘shagging’ there!”
 
“Don’t know about you, but I’m going to pretend you never saw that.  If and when it comes out, it’s going to get messy, and I’d just as soon not be involved.”
 
“Coward!”
 
“Guilty.  Come on, pet. Doyou want to be the one to tell Alex both his girls are shagging other people? Or to tell the other happy couple that they aren’t a couple?  Think how we feel, now that we know we probably weren’t together….”
 
“How  do we feel?” she asked, staring down at the book instead of at him. “It’s not like we just found out we were in love with other people. All we know right now is that we weren’t living together….”
 
“Alright, I’ll give you that. I was in love with you, so that part’s still good – just haven’t heard anything yet to indicate you loved me back.”
 
Buffy put her head down to keep reading. “We’ll find it,” she said, her face setting into stubborn lines. “It probably just took me a while to get over whats-his-name leaving me.”
 
As she got further and further into the events of the previous year, she began to frown and huddle into his side. “OMG. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can see why Dawn and I might have wanted to lose our memories.  A god? A Hellgod? That’s what I was fighting?  And my boyfriend was getting suck jobs from vamp whores?” She smiled at Randy’s snarl.  “It’s okay, seems like you found out and showed me…. Oh, then he left me. Awesome. No wonder I fell in love with you.”
 
“Nothing here that indicates you were in love with me, pet. Sounds like you were tolerating me for the extra muscle, that’s all.”
 
Joan didn’t answer, her attention back on the pages in front of her. She flinched when she came to the part where Dawn described how Buffy’d shown up at her school to tell her their mother was dead. And how Dawn had tried to work a spell to bring her back.  Spike’s name continued to show up now and then, Dawn had apparently used his feelings for Buffy to get him to do things for her – including getting the ingredients she needed for the spell.  Joan’s glare and slight movement away from his side had him apologizing for something he had no memory of doing.
 
She quickly scanned the rest of the book, keeping it where Randy could read it along with her.  A choked gasp accompanied the entry about the Buffy-bot.
 
“A robot? Seriously?” She stared at him, horrified and curious. “How could you?”
 
He wouldn’t meet her gaze, just stared at his hands as they clenched into fists. “If I’m understanding what’s between the lines here, I’m guessing I thought that was as close as I was going to get to the real thing.  Haven’t seen a thing yet to indicate you were anything but disgusted at my feelings for you.  You used me for backup muscle, nothing else. Even took away my invite to the house.”
 
The revelation about the Bot was closely followed by an entry about the torture Spike had endured at Glory’s hands, and Buffy’s ruse that, rather than giving her a reason to stake him, had been a turning point in their relationship.
 
Dawn’s terror at being discovered, the arrival of the homicidal knights, and the subsequent flight from Sunnydale was covered in sketchy detail. The next to last entry just said that they were leaving Sunnydale. There were no more entries until the final page, dated several days later.
 
“Buffy’s dead,” was all it said. 
  They gasped simultaneously.
 
“What the bloody—”
 
“Well, obviously that’s wrong… I mean, I’m here and I…” She looked at her boxed up belongings with newly aware eyes, then jumped to her feet and began to dig frantically through the boxes.  “Dawn said I have diaries too.  They must be in here somewhere…”
 
She stopped digging when Randy put his arms around her and held her tightly. “Calm down, love.  We know it’s not true, don’t we? Can’t be true. You’re here, living, breathing, all heartbeat having, warm and….”
 
He was just nibbling on her neck to distract her, hoping to remind her just how alive she was, when Dawn stuck her head back in the doorway.
 
“Stop that!” She put her hands over her eyes. “I’m young and impressionable, you know!”
 
“Probably why I moved out,” Joan grumbled, reluctantly pushing Randy away.  “As long as you’re here – what the hell does this mean?”  She pointed at words on the otherwise blank page.
 
Dawn shook her head. “I don’t really know,” she admitted.  “All I’ve got after that is one that says…  I don’t know.  It just starts out ‘Buffy’s back’ and goes on from there.  There’s a bunch of pages torn out, but I don’t know where they are or what they said.”
 
“Well what do the ones you do have say? What do you mean, it goes on from there?”
 
Dawn looked uncomfortable. “It’s mostly…. look, it’s private stuff, okay? I’ll just write out the important things that apply to you.”  Before Joan could object, Dawn grabbed a piece of blank paper from the journal Randy was still holding and began to scribble on it.  “At first I’m like, really, really happy.  But then, you started being all… weird… about being back. Like you weren’t happy to be here. And you started hanging out with Spike a lot…” She flashed Randy a look.  “And I was kinda unhappy that he wasn’t paying as much attention to me as he did before you got back…”
 
“Back from where? Where did I go?”
 
Dawn took a deep breath. “I think you were… really dead.  There’s some stuff about… about finding you, and washing dirt out from under your fingernails, and demons, and Willow…  and I…” She looked from Joan to Randy.  “I think Willow somehow brought you back.”
 
“Whoa!”
 
“Bloody hell!”
 
“Is that why almost all my stuff is in boxes in the closet?”
 
Dawn shrugged. “I don’t know.  It’s not like I write stuff like that in my diary. ‘Dear Diary, Today we packed up all Buffy’s stuff that she doesn’t need on account of she’s dead and—”
 
“Why do you think Willow did… it? I mean not why why, cause I’m sure if she’s my friend, she missed me, but why do you think it was her?”
 
“She said something about it. About finding a spell … Willow and Tara had a big fight about it. Tara said she was crazy to even think about messing with that kind of magic. That’s all I wrote about it. They didn’t tell me anything and they stopped yelling when they saw me listening.”
 
“Tara got that right,” Randy said. “Don’t need my memory to know that would take some serious mojo… and have some serious consequences.”
 
“Do you think this is one of the consequences?  That none of us can remember anything?”  Joan looked at Randy like he should know all he answers to mystical questions, but he just shrugged.
 
“I don’t think so,” Dawn said quietly “I think it happened a while ago. Not real long ago, maybe, but more than just the few weeks that we’ve been like this. And—”
 
“And?” Joan prompted when Dawn just stared at the paper in her hand.
 
“And… there’s something about singing, and a singing demon that wanted to—okay, never mind about that—but you sang that…that…” She raised her eyes to Joan’s.  “That you’d been in Heaven. That they dragged you out of Heaven and that’s why you were acting so weird. You didn’t want to be here anymore.”
 
“Isang?” Joan focused on the easy part of the information. “I don’t sing. I don’t think I sing. Do I sing?”  She looked at Randy anxiously.
 
“Haven’t heard you do it, love, but doesn’t mean you – real you – can’t or doesn’t.”
 
Dawn waved her hand. “I think everybody was singing. It was a whole… singing thing. But then the demon went back to Hell and we could all stop singing.”
 
“I was in Heaven.” Joan sat down hard, almost bouncing off the edge of the bed. “I was dead and in Heaven, and Willow pulled me out?  Why would she do that to me?”
 
“When we get our memories back, you can ask her.”
 
Joan just sat on the bed, her arms wrapped around her body and rocking back and forth.  “Dead. I was dead. I was in Heaven. I was dead….”
 
Randy sat down beside her and wrapped his own arms around her trembling body.  “It’ll be alright, love.  You’re here now. I’ve got you. Not letting you go.”
 
“About that…” Dawn began, halting in mid sentence when Randy turned a murderous glare on her.  “Right. You’ve got Randy, and he loves you, and you love him and it’s all… good.”