Disclaimer: The show and all characters belonging to the BTVS universe are not the creation or property of this fanfiction author.

****

She set the books on top of one another, barely looking at the covers, just trying to see if she could stack them by size, widest on the bottom to provide more of a balance, more chance of stacking them higher and higher until it looked like she’d built a tower, maybe a little less rickety then the one she had flung herself from to save the world and that she had nearly flung herself from again once she was dragged back into it.

“Buffy...”

When she turned, Willow’s face was a mask of hurt that she tried to shutter, but not before the pity bled through, too. She turned away and looked back at her book tower. She selfishly wanted to knock it down and disturb the whole magic shop with one bare ripple of her real emotions, as if those were allowed.

“What is it, Wills?”

“Are you...” Willow stopped, unsure. “I think...” She swallowed. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Buffy shrugged, vacant eyed, taking the tower of books back apart so they could be put away in their proper places. “About what?”

“Oh... I don’t know... maybe how a guy you’ve apparently been in love with for a little while without telling anyone just kicked it saving your life?”

She stopped what she was doing and looked down at the half-apart book stack with a clenched jaw. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wills. I wasn’t... I wasn’t in love with—”

“Fine, in like, Semantics. You two were apparently... a thing of some kind... and now he’s....”

Buffy looked away, then longingly towards the training room door.

“You don’t have to talk to me.” The witch tried to reduce the hurt in her voice, not wanting to burden her best friend with her own emotions when all along she’d been struggling with the severity of her own pain and keeping secrets to not hurt them all. “I’m not going to assume anything, I won’t judge. Okay, maybe last year I would have... been with the judgy. But not this... not now. Guess that’s not really my place to judge anymore....”

“It never was.” Buffy closed her eyes and bowed her head. “What does it matter now? It’s done... he’s... he’s gone.” The word was soft, barely making the air shiver with her breath. But somehow all the air seemed to leave her again, like another punch to her already battered ribs. She rubbed at them absently.

“Do you want a healing—”

“No.”

The red head winced again, but then nodded and sat at the table. “If... if you do want to....”

“I don’t,” Buffy answered in a monotone. “Can I go now?”

“Hey,” Willow finally let her pain bleed into her voice. “I’m not holding you here against your will.”

Buffy turned on her heel to glare at her friend. “Really? Because that’s exactly what you seemed to do from my end.”

Willow swallowed. “I’m sorry. And I’m even more sorry because I can’t be sorry that you’re back, that you’re here. I know I’d be a better friend if I was. Maybe it would hurt you less. Or maybe nothing will ever hurt less again. I am... I am sorry for being a dummy, getting it wrong, not thinking... I just... I’m not trying to hold you here. It’s just... I’ve seen you in love before, Buffy, once upon a time. And I... I don’t know why, but I don’t have to. Maybe... maybe I kind of—”

“I need to go, Wills. Dawn will be home soon.”

Willow sighed and looked down at her hand. “What I’m trying to say is, no matter how you feel or don’t feel about S... about him, it’s okay. However you.... if you love him, if you don’t—”

She looked up and found her friend’s eyes in a vacant stare that reminded the witch of when Dawn had been kidnapped. She shivered at the sight, already thinking of ways to bring her back.

Instead the slayer’s eyes shimmered before going more distant again.

Do you trust me?

Never.

She did. She had for over a year. She trusted him with her life and her mother and sister’s lives. He was someone strong she could always depend on, whether to show up at the worst time or risk his life.

And now I’m stuck here, and it’s without him.

The floor became blurry. Her shoes looked like white paint drips.

“Oh, Buffy—”

She didn’t know that the floor was getting closer until she felt the arms around her, smelled Willow’s familiar green-apple shampoo when her chin found the top of the witch’s head.

“Buffy...” Her voice was choked, and it seemed like she couldn’t say anything. Neither of them could.

She didn’t know there were tears until they fell in fat droplets on the floor. They had blurry edges. Everything was blurry and she didn’t know if anything would be clear again, if she’d ever have a solid form that could withstand her strength that she could wrap around and cling to until the world became sensations again and not just a bunch of blurry gray blobs.

The strangled sob that ripped from her throat was ugly, but it was nothing compared to the next, or to the way her whole form shook and quivered in the other woman’s arms. She felt Willow’s insistent hand on the back of her head and rested her head on the other woman’s shoulder, mouth and nose pointed away to keep the faintly dripping snot and heavy tears from soaking her at least.

Willow rocked her sobbing friend on the floor of the magic shop, grateful that it was closed.

“I can’t—” Buffy choked. “Will, I can’t—he...how am I going to... he was just always—”

The ugly sobs were back until they became quick sniffles that she tried to quiet. She wiped hastily at her face with the back of her hand and struggled to rise with shaky footing.

“Buffy—”

“No... I can’t do this.” She walked quickly towards the door.

“It’s okay to cry, Buffy—”

Buffy yanked the door open and slammed it shut behind her, cracking the glass but luckily not shattering it.

Willow watched her retreat down the street forlornly. “... it’s okay to love the guy who saved your life.”

* * * *

He was spread-eagle and his eyes were open but blank.

She looked, she watched, begging silently to see him breathe again. He was always breathing if he was talking and any time his eyes were open, he was talking. That’s how she knew when he was awake. He wouldn’t be able to keep quiet for very long. When he did, he held his breath as if in anticipation of her mistreatment.

She needed to see him breathe. “Spike... Spike... SPIKE!” She shook him hard until his body jerked, but still his eyes were sightless and staring up at the ceiling of the Magic Box.

“Spike...” She shook him harder, then backhanded him.

“Buffy! That’s enough.” Xander’s voice grated.

There were hands on her, grabbing her, even though their owners had to know they couldn’t hold on to her.

“Wake up!” She shouted at him. “Wake up! I know you’re just faking it, you... you...”

“What’s gotten into her?”

“I have no idea.”

* * * *

 “Don’t... don’t leave me again....”

Spike smiled. “Never would have, you know, ‘f you didn’t want me to.”

Her eyes burned. She blinked back tears and shook her head. “I never wanted this. I never wanted... for you to not be here.”

He smirked and shrugged. “Guess you should have told me, yeah? Maybe—”

She sat upright, breathing in sharply, surprised at her eyes stinging at the ringing pain of loss in her chest, crushing in on her until she couldn’t breathe when she remembered, finally: remembered his stillness. He wasn’t dust, he was... a corpse. He was the empty shell she always accused him of being. Except now that he really was, she could finally see how far from empty he’d always been.

* * * *

“I... I need to see him. What if you’re wrong? What if he’s just... I don’t know, trapped? Stuck? What then? What if there’s a way to...”

“He’s already been... untrapped. Unstuck. There’s no demon in him, Buffy... I... I checked.”

“Checked? How? What did you see?”

“Nothing, just...” Willow’s eyes shined a little, as if she were holding back tears. “He’s just a body. There’s... there’s no Spike in there, Buffy. I would have found him if there were.”

“No...” She shook her head. “No. Vampires dust when they die, Willow.”

“I know... but if you remove the demon...” She shrugged. “I don’t know how to bring it back. And I don’t know how to make him alive again after he’s spent so long dead. I wouldn’t begin to know where to look for his soul. I’m sorry I... I’m sorry I can’t bring him back to you.”

The slayer shook her head and stormed towards the door.

“Buffy, we had a funeral and everything. You don’t want to open that crypt. You’ll just... if you did care about him, I don’t think you’d want to see him when—”

“I have to, Wills. He’d check... if it were me, and it were uncertain—”

“But it isn’t.”

“He’d check. He wouldn’t... he wouldn’t just...” She turned and left.

* * * *

“Bet that couldn’t have been a pleasant sight. Won’t let you keep doing this to yourself, Luv.”

“Why?”  she whispers. “I got you killed.”

He shook his head. “No pet. Love’s bitch, remember? If it weren’t for you, I would have just died for whoever else I loved. Think it was rather my fate, yeah? Some things you can’t escape... some things not even death fixes.”

She sat up with a start, clutching her blanket to her chest. “Spike...”

She expected to see him there, lurking in the shadows, watching her sleep. He had only ever lurked over her like that once before, when he’d come to tell her what Riley had been up to one late evening.

The room was dim with early morning light. A weary squint at her alarm clock revealed it was just before five A.M. She’d woken up every twenty minutes, falling asleep but dreaming of him near, and her heart rate reacting to him as it always did would wake her right back up before her dream self could even get close enough to his dream self to touch him, to even begin to wonder or hope if he could be real. In a way Buffy wanted nothing except to dream and find him the only place she could now, but she was also terrified to sleep, afraid of the time that would inevitably come when he wouldn’t be there either. It did not make for a restful time.

The birds sang, welcoming her to the dim morning she reluctantly decided to sink into. She listened idly to the noises of the world coming alive, with all its demands waiting, and no comforting arms, verbal sparring, or mind-erasing ecstasy to escape it.

Over a week ago, she couldn’t quite recall how long, she had almost escaped from hell again. The demon who split Xander into two people with a big glowy staff apparently had a brother, and his brother wanted revenge and came to get it with, surprise, a big glowy staff. Except the vampire she was only now coming to realize was hers stepped in front of her, because of course he did.

The problem was that the beam of light didn’t make two Spikes. (Double trouble? Double Yum?) Instead it left one Spike on the floor with vacant eyes and no innuendos about how he deserved a “snog” in front of her friends for saving her life, no snark that would give her an excuse to punch him and remind herself of his solid presence, it just left a stillness in the room shaped like someone it could never be more unnatural to who died for her because he had loved her enough to.