It was nearly eleven when Buffy got back to Spike, with Willow in tow. They opened the crypt to the image of Spike in his arm chair, in front of the television half asleep, with the boy in his lap, completely zonked. The boy’s wispy brown hair was all that was visible in the swath of black knit that was his and Spike’s t-shirts.

    Spike started as they came in, looked a bit embarrassed, and then realized he couldn’t just shove the kid away and pretend he hadn’t been holding him. “The brat passed out,” he said as Buffy turned off the television.

    Willow came up and looked down at the sleeping child. “Aww! He’s cute!” she said. “Do you really think he could be a vampire? He’s so cute.”

    “Right,” Spike said, looking sidelong at Buffy with a flirtatious smile. “Because all us vampires look like night of the living dead.”

    Buffy blushed, much to her own surprise, and cleared her throat. “Willow says she has a spell that can tell us if he’ll vamp up.”

    “Well, that’d be useful,” Spike said. “Can you do it now? Or...?”

    “Oh, yeah,” Willow said. “Um... I think I need him standing alone.”

    “Okay, um...” Spike tried to figure out the best way of extricating himself from the boy without waking him too harshly.

    “Oh, let me get him!” Willow said. She reached for the boy and picked him up.

    She was gentle, but the second the boy opened his eyes, he screamed anyway, shaking as if facing a nightmare. “What are... I didn’t do anything!” Willow cried.

    “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” the boy screamed.

    “He doesn’t know you,” Spike said, realizing the source of the trauma. Buffy and Spike had clearly rescued him from what must have been the most traumatic thing ever to happen in his life. Willow was a stranger, and this boy expected pain and murder from strangers.

    Buffy ran to his side. “Hey, hey, it’s okay! It’s okay, we got you!” she said, taking the child from Willow’s arms.

    “Want Mommy,” the kid whimpered, crying. “Want Mommy, Buppy.”

    It was such a pitiful plea that Buffy found tears in her eyes. “I know you do,” she said. “I know.” She still found herself at times wanting to break down into tears, crying out she wanted her mommy. Why did everyone demand she keep standing strong, the perfect slayer who always knew what to do, when all she wanted to do was just collapse? Sometimes it was all she could do to keep breathing. The boy kept crying.

    “Any luck on that front?” Spike asked quietly.

    Buffy shook her head. “No missing children reported to the police,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean...”

    “There’s no one left to report him,” Spike said darkly.

    “Don’t say that!” Willow said to Spike, as if his saying it would cause it to happen. “This little guy is gonna be just fine.”

    “Don’t say that,” Spike said back at her, pointedly. “You don’t know if it’s true.”

    Buffy looked from one to the other of them. There was some tension there she couldn’t put her finger on. “So, can you do the spell?” she asked Willow. She rummaged in the grocery bag and pulled out another juice box. The brat – the child, she corrected herself, unwilling to be sucked into Spike’s dismissive name – seemed content with that, so she set him on the floor. He hid behind Spike, peeking suspiciously out at Willow.

    “Oh, yeah!” Willow said. She went over to Spike’s sarcophagus, and pulled out four sticks of incense. “Can you wave these around the room?” she asked Buffy after she’d lit them. “I need the smoke to saturate the air as much as possible.” She poured a bunch of crystals onto the surface of the sarcophagus and began to arrange them in an intricate pattern.

    Spike crouched on the floor, and the boy petted his hair again. “Kitty 'Pike,” the boy said.

    “So, this’ll tell us if he’s gonna turn,” Spike asked, looking doubtful.

    “Well, it should reveal any demons, or potential demons, in the area,” Willow said. “If the boy has a potential demon inside him, it should appear as an incorporeal image superimposed over his physical form.”

    “And if he doesn’t?”

    “Then nothing,” Willow said. “Buffy?”

    “Well, I waved it around a lot,” Buffy said, bringing the sticks of incense back.

    “Okay.” Willow stuck the incense into four black holders. “Can you put these around the boy?”

    “If he’ll stay still that long,” Buffy said. She set the incense on the floor, and Spike stood by the brat, making sure he didn’t touch the glowing end of the burning sticks. Which, of course, he instantly wanted to do.

    “Pwetty!”

    Willow was muttering something inaudible over her intricate checker board of crystals and stones. Her voice began to grow louder as she worked, and she gripped the edge of the sarcophagus as if she was trying not to be blown away by something. Then she lifted her head and shouted loud, her voice ringing in the echoing chamber. “Revelet daemones. Aperio!”

    The room was suddenly filled with demons, hundreds of them, overlaid, merged, arms and legs sticking out of intangible torsos. Many kinds of demons, some of which Buffy recognized, most of which she didn’t. There was a sudden roar of rage and pain and hunger as the demons noticed them, and then they all attacked as one....

    Willow muttered something, and the demons vanished, apart from Spike, whose face had gone full dark. Though the demons appeared to be gone, the screams continued, in the form of a two-year-old child who had just been terrified out of his wits.

    The sound was excruciating, echoing around the concrete walls. Buffy went down to the boy and tried to comfort him, but he was having none of it. He was tense and flailing, still looking about the room for the monsters that had nearly attacked.

    The only monster there was Spike, who had grabbed Willow by the throat and pushed her up against the wall. He winced as his chip fired, but he was too angry to care. “What the hell do you think you’re doing!” he growled at her.

    “Spike, leave her alone!” Buffy shouted at him.

    “You had no idea what that spell would do, did you!” Spike snarled at the witch. “You found a spell to reveal a demon and thought, oh, I’ll just fiddle with it. Pour enough power through it, it’ll do whatever the hell I want it to!”

    “Spike!” Buffy tried to get his attention, but her voice was simply an echo compared to the child’s screams.

    Willow actually looked terrified. Her face was white beneath her red hair. “I was doing what Buffy asked!”

    “If you couldn’t do it, you should have just said so!” Spike barked. “You decide to get your little witchy fingers into everything, whether you should or not, without bothering to figure out what the bloody consequences will be! You just pulled a viable, reactive image of every potential demon out of every reality for dozens of dimensions, you silly bint. They’ve all seen us here, whether they can cross dimensions or not. This crypt is probably still crackling with power. I’ll be fighting off curious invaders for weeks. Do you have any sodding clue–”

    “Repellendorum,” Willow said, and Spike was shunted across the room, hard. He hit the wall across the crypt, slid down, and then launched himself upright, ready for a fight.

    “Stop it!” Buffy shouted. She abandoned the boy on the floor and stood between Spike and Willow. “Spike, calm down!”

    “Get out of my way!” Spike snarled.

    “You’ll only get hurt!” Buffy pointed out, which was true, one way or another – a witch she might have been, but Willow was still technically human. “And Willow, I think maybe you should–”

    But Willow’s blood was up, too. She pushed past Buffy, her hair moving as if stirred by wind, or hot air. “Powers of Ambrogio, goddess Selene–”

    “Gonna play it that way, are you?” Spike shouted.

    “Both of you!” Buffy intervened again, this time physically restraining Willow, turning her, dragging her attention to her. “Spike, go downstairs.”

    “I’m not gonna–”

    “Take the boy, and go downstairs!” Buffy barked.

    With a snarl Spike finally listened, scooping up the kid – to his even louder shrieks – and descending the ladder.

    “Willow, what was that spell?” Buffy asked.

    Willow seemed a little zoned.

    “Willow!”

    Willow shook her head, seeming to come out of it. “You said you wanted to know if the boy was turning to a vampire.”

    “Yeah.”

    “Well, there wasn’t a spell for it, but I knew one for revealing demonic powers within a given area, and I thought if I just altered it for potential, with a–”

    “So, you just said you could do it, when you didn’t know?”

    “You asked me, you said you needed to know!” Willow said. “I thought I could.”

    Buffy closed her eyes. The boy was still screaming in the lower chamber. She wished she’d never brought Willow here. Whatever she might have been able to tell them, it wasn’t worth this. “Whatever,” Buffy said. “I’ve got to go sort this out.”

    “I’m sorry about the demons,” Willow said, collecting her bag from the floor and scooping her crystals back into it. “But Spike actually attacked me!”

    “He only held you,” Buffy said. “You pretty much attacked him.”

    “I didn’t–”

    “What do you call it, then?” Buffy asked. “Bringing a demon army into his home.”

    “An accident.”

    Buffy didn’t feel like she could deal with this just now. “Just go, I’ll see you at the house,” she said.

    “Buffy–”

    “Will you get out of here? I have a potential demon child to deal with.”

    Willow stalked out the door, but Buffy heard her parting words. “Did you mean the kid, or Spike?”

    Buffy closed her eyes, trying not to break down then and there. This was too much. She wished she was the boy, and could just start screaming and screaming and screaming.... Her vision faded to grey for a moment, and the sounds of the child’s screaming began to pulse into a roar of white noise, and the weight of the air, of the entire cursed world seemed so heavy around her, choking, suffocating, she was smothering in it, like the earth she’d had to claw her way out of....

    She opened her eyes a moment later to find herself squeezing her head with her hands, as if she could drown out the world. She took a deep breath, shook the sensation out of her head, and went down to deal with the current crisis.

    She came down the ladder to find the child on the bed, still screaming, but less loudly, and Spike pacing back and forth, his eyes still hooded in darkness. “Willow’s gone,” she told Spike. “You can calm down now.”

    “Calm down?” Spike said through his fangs. “After what she did?”

    “I think your face is still scaring the kid,” Buffy said over his cries. “Can you go back human, at least?”

    “No, I bloody can’t,” Spike snapped. “That spell was like an electromagnet. She dragged it out of me, I’m stuck. I’m still humming with it.”

    “She dragged the demon out of you?” Buffy said. She had to raise her voice over the boy’s screams. “Shouldn’t that mean there isn’t one in the kid?”

    “We don’t know what it means!” Spike snarled. “When she didn’t have a spell for what she wanted, she just tried to make one up on the fly. She just added power and ripped a window through dimensions, with no more thought than you or I would put into adding ice to our drink. She doesn’t look beyond the surface, can’t care past what she wants, and has no idea about the bleeding consequences of her actions!”

    “Spike, I agree she should have told me she couldn’t do it, but–”

    “No buts!” Spike yelled. “I’m sick of her and your bloody Scoobies going behind my back, and then acting like I should be grateful they treat me like the sodding watch dog!”

    “Spike!” Buffy yelled back. “Can we just calm the kid?”

    Finally Spike stopped his pacing and took a deep breath. “Maybe you should take him out of here till this wears off,” he said.

    “Will it?” Buffy asked.

    Spike shrugged. “Probably,” he said. He rubbed his forehead. “Hope so. It’s making my face ache.”

    Buffy left the kid gasping – he’d been crying so long he was running out of energy for it – and went up to Spike. “Let me see.”

    “Buffy–” Spike stopped his protest when he realized he didn’t care what she did to him, so long as she was close to him. Buffy reached up with both hands and touched his forehead with her fingertips, smoothing along his eyebrows with her warm skin, gently caressing the vampiric flesh down along his cheekbones. Spike closed his yellow eyes for a moment at her touch, and then gazed upon her in wonder until they slowly faded back to his own normal blue. Buffy felt the hard demonic flesh soften beneath her fingers, and Spike slowly morph into himself again, with her hands caressing him. They were very close. Spike made a small movement with his head, possibly the beginning bend of a kiss, but Buffy pulled away – not hurriedly, but definitively. He didn’t seem disappointed.

    They both turned back to the boy, who was still crying. “Hey, now, come on,” Buffy said, sitting down on one side of the bed.

    Spike sat on the other. “If he did have any demon in him, that spell probably hurt,” he said.

    “Either way, it scared him silly,” Buffy said. “He’s had enough trauma as it is.”

    “Ahug!” the boy was crying out. “Ahug! Ahug!”

    Buffy reached out when she interpreted. The boy clambered into her lap in exhausted desperation and collapsed against her chest, still weeping. Buffy held him gently, rocking him side to side. “You can have a hug,” she said. “You can have all the hugs you want. It’s okay. It’s all over. The monsters are all gone now.”

    “For the most part,” Spike said.

    Buffy glanced up at him. “They’re all gone,” she said again.

    As the boy’s tears faded into exhaustion, Spike reached out and touched his hair. What he really wanted to do was touch Buffy – he had found her soothing of his vampire flesh incredibly intimate – but he knew he didn’t quite have the right to. “You know, even if he’s not gonna turn, this kid’s gonna have some demons.”

    “Yeah?”

    Spike looked at her. “Trauma, nightmares, I’ll bet his parents are cold meat.”

    “Don’t say that,” Buffy said, looking uncomfortable.

    Spike shrugged. “It’s true,” he said, still petting the boy in her arms. “This is nasty business.”

    The boy was pale and shaken, and cuddled against Buffy as if he was hiding from the world. He didn’t seem to mind Spike petting him. Buffy looked up at him. “You were pretty mad at Willow.”

    “I’ve been pretty mad at Willow for months,” Spike said. “This was just the last straw.”

    “What were you angry about?”

    Spike looked at her with an eyebrow raised. “What do you think?”

    Buffy sighed. “She meant well,” she said, her voice soft and pained as it always was when she thought about her resurrection. “They all did.”

    “Yeah, well, she meant well behind my back,” Spike said. “They all did.”

    “They didn’t tell Dawn, either,” Buffy said.

    “They didn’t tell Dawn because they didn’t want to disappoint her. They didn’t tell Giles, because they knew he’d try to stop them. They only didn’t tell me because they didn’t bloody want to.”

    “You don’t know that.”

    “Yeah, I do. They still don’t trust me.”

    Buffy looked up at him. “Can you blame them?”

    Spike’s eyes narrowed. “I came at their beck and call like a bloody attack hound, all damn summer. They use me when they like, and treat me like dirt when they’re done. They wanted my strength, they didn’t want me. I might as well have been their whore.”

    “That’s a little harsh.”

    “Fine,” Spike said. “Hired gun. But they’re not my friends.”

    Buffy considered this. “What if they had told you?” she asked.

    “What do you mean?”

    “Giles would have tried to stop them,” Buffy said. “But what if they had told you?”

    Spike was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I helped the niblet when she wanted your mum back,” he said. “But I knew that spell. It wasn’t a permanent retrieval, and it was easily undone. Manifest spirit sort of thing, bound to the photograph, tangible, but still one foot in the grave, as it were. Break the talisman, rip the photo, and she’d rubber-band right back to where she came from.”

    Buffy almost sobbed at the thought that a single tear or snap could send her back to heaven. Why couldn’t Willow have done that sort of spell? While it was comforting to know that Dawn’s dabbling in the afterlife couldn’t have disturbed her mother’s peace for long, it was heartbreaking that such a release wasn’t available for herself.

    “I just figured Joyce would get the chance to say her goodbyes before she asked to go again. I mean, spirits don’t age, they don’t really live, so they don’t usually want to stay long unless something specific is unfinished. Joyce was a sensible lady. She’d give you both a hug, get the chance to say she loved you. Maybe impart some last wisdom. And if it didn’t work clean, if the spirit was corrupted, or there was some kind of hitchhiker, it could go right back with no harm done to her spirit. But that was a very different spell. Willow wanted you alive.”

    “So what if you had known what they were trying to do?” Buffy asked. “Would you have helped them?”

    Spike stared at her. “It’s not a fair question,” he said at last. “You know how I feel about you. But you also know I know you’re unhappy. So anything I say will be suspect. I didn’t know. That’s all I can say.”

    “What did you think when you saw...?”

    “When I saw you were back?” Spike said. “You mean, did I think it good or bad?”

    “Yeah.”

    Spike shrugged. “I try not to think that much. I had accepted your death.... I know death. It never even occurred to me to think beyond the grief. I know that magic has consequences – I’m not sure Willow does.” He shook his head. “Really, all I could think was that I wanted to hold you.” He reached out and touched the boy again, snuggled against Buffy in a way that Spike longed to be, and knew he probably never would.

    Buffy wanted to say something flippant and dismissive, ignoring the confession of his feelings, but she couldn’t think what it could be. She didn’t feel amused, or disgusted, or annoyed, or any of the other things she used to feel about Spike. “Do you think he’s okay now?” she asked instead.

    “We’ll know if he lets us take him back upstairs,” Spike said.

    “Lets get some lunch in him, somehow,” Buffy said. “And then... it’s past your bedtime, isn’t it.”

    “Long past. But I can live without sleep if I have to.”

    “I thought you said I needed to relieve you on child care.”

    “That was before Willow decided to open the gates of hell, on a lark,” Spike said. “I’m starting to feel like the brat actually needs protecting.”

    “I can do that,” Buffy said. “You sleep. I think this little guy and I will be okay for the afternoon. Don’t you?” she asked the boy.

    “Hug Buppy,” was all he said, snuggling in close. His face was still tear-stained and tragic. “Hug Buppy.”