They hadn't had time to watch television, back then. There were too many preparations to make for the battle against the First, too much pain and suffering in the now to worry about what was going on around them.

They'd fought alone, driven back the Turok-Han with little success. But it hadn't mattered in the end. Willow's spell had turned the tide of good against evil, and the First had been forced to concede defeat. Spike had bled, the blood of a repentant murderer closing the Seal, and they'd won. The city had been safe.

Kennedy had been the first to go when she'd flipped on her headphones to listen to the radio. She'd immediately sank to the ground, espousing the majesty and beauty of someone called Jasmine. They'd been confused, but ignored Kennedy as much as possible. It was only Kennedy, after all.

Robin had been next, Andrew the third. Suspicion had grown, but no one understood for what.

Then, Kennedy had turned on the television in front of Dawn and six of the remaining Slayers, and they'd been lost, too. The Scoobies had finally put two and two together, and the remaining survivors had fled. Giles. Faith. Xander. Willow. Vi. Amanda. Rona. And Buffy and Spike, who hadn't parted since the Hellmouth was closed. They'd taken the getaway bus and gotten the hell out of town, unsure of where they'd be safe.

Now, they were hurtling through the desert at top speed, heading nowhere fast. Buffy was carefully painting over the back windows with a black color Spike was fairly certain would block out the sun. She couldn't do the front few rows, not if they wanted to be able to see at all, but at least Spike would be able to move through the back.

He laid a hand on her shaking one. "Hey. It's okay. We'll get the Bit back."

"It wasn't her," she whispered, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the window. "God, it was worse than the First. It just pretended to be us. This thing...it took Dawn away. Made her something else."

He pulled her into an embrace and she sank into it gratefully. "We can do this," he promised. "We defeated the First Evil. We can take on this Jasmine bint."

She turned to kiss him slowly, lazily, enjoying his closeness and the way that they could be together without so much as a dirty look from Giles or Xander. In the wake of the more important tragedies, both had given up on protesting their relationship. And Spike never gave up a chance to rub it in.

Not that Buffy was complaining.

"Look!" It was Amanda, who'd managed to stay upbeat while the others mourned. "There's a farmhouse ahead!"

And there was, incongruous in the blank expanse surrounding them, half upright and half buried in the sand from a previous earthquake. It was perfect.

"...A little too perfect," Spike was noting, but Buffy didn't want to hear it.

Neither did the others. "I say we take whatever we can get," Rona argued, squinting ahead. "There's no way Jasmine's gotten here. There are no phone lines, no TV antenna... Even if someone lives there, it's probably safe."

"'Probably' being the operative word here," Giles said darkly, and he and Spike exchanged looks of suspicion and apprehension that only annoyed Buffy. She was tired of running, tired of hiding as her friends and family were picked off one by one. She'd lost Dawnie, dammit! And if she couldn't save Dawn, then why should she save herself?

"Buffy?" Faith was looking to her expectantly. "What do you want to do?"

She inhaled slowly, her decision already made. "We'll stay here tonight."

And it was decided.

--

Spike was their people detector, and as soon as he set foot in the house Buffy was calm again. "It's abandoned," she announced. "We're okay."

But there were so many clues to the contrary. In the study, Giles found several mystical-looking books on the table that he deemed Watcher material and not dusty in the slightest. Rona and Vi found clothes in one of the upstairs rooms that were still soaked with wet blood. And Spike opened the refrigerator to see a stack of blood bags with an expiration date three days from then.

"Someone's been here," Xander said unnecessarily. "And recently."

Faith opened the top of the coffee maker to reveal fresh grinds. "This couldn't have been made before yesterday. But it's been unplugged-"

"To plug in the radio," Buffy said grimly, eying the communications device with trepidation. "Whoever was here must have been affected by Jasmine."

"But the blood..." Spike shook his head. "There was a vampire here. Are vampires susceptible to whatever Jasmine's done?"

"I won't risk it," she said quietly, laying her head against his shoulder. "I can't lose you." it was as close to "I love you" as she'd ever get, and they both knew it. Knew that she could never love Spike, soul or not. She was too damaged to love.

So he kissed the top of her head and squeezed her hand, and she dodged Willow's knowing gaze and inhaled the scent of tobacco and alcohol and everything Spike.

Later that night, as she curled up next to him in one of the rooms that was buried belowground, she wondered if it could be enough for him to stay. So she tried to stroke him to arousal and he woke up and gently moved her hand away. "I can't," he murmured, almost fearfully, and she moved away, feeling like the villain and suddenly distant from her former lover.

The next afternoon, when Buffy finally rose, Vi had already prepared a meal for all of them. "The fridge is fully stocked," she told them. "It's like someone knew that we were coming."

"That's one way of putting it," Faith said dryly, hefting a large axe.

Buffy looked at it askance. "That's not one of ours."

"There's a weapons chest downstairs," Rona confirmed. "Along with a room locked so securely that even Willow can't break in."

"Willow?"

"It's sealed magically," Faith explained.

"We've got to get inside," Buffy decided. Anything was better than running. Even a pointless mission. And the others agreed, so they all traipsed down the lopsided stairs to get into the locked room.

They tried kicking down the door, all five slayers together, but were propelled backwards by an invisible force. Willow and Giles joined forces to magick down the door, and Willow was knocked out halfway through their first attempt.

"It doesn't feel so strong," she complained. "That's what doesn't make sense. The caster wasn't particularly powerful, I can feel it. But whatever's on the other side of the door...it's frighteningly strong."

"Perhaps this isn't about keeping us out," Giles muttered.

"It's about keeping that thing in," Spike finished, coming up behind her to wrap her arms around her waist. Relieved that she'd been forgiven for the previous night, she leaned peacefully into his embrace.

"Exactly." Giles sounded miffed at having his insight taken from him. "Perhaps it's best if we let this go."

"I'm not sleeping in a house with some creepy demon lurking in the basement," Rona protested.

Buffy couldn't care less. The war should have been over. They should have won, should have at least had the summer off. And if this was as close as they could get to a vacation, no one would ruin it. "Then you'll sleep on the bus," she said coldly, and even Faith started at the steel in her voice.

Rona slept inside, but she clung to her axe the entire time. Halfway through the night, Amanda said she’d heard the other girl sneak out of bed and down the stairs.

In the morning, she was gone, and the door in the basement ajar so they could see the empty room inside.

“I don’t get it,” Willow said, frowning. “The power’s all gone. There’s barely even a magical trace.”

“Maybe it was fed,” Xander said gloomily, lifting Rona’s axe from the floor to inspect it.

He was the last one remaining when Buffy and Spike finally retreated back upstairs, and he never reappeared.

--

They’d learned soon enough not to go down to the basement alone, and everyone moved with a partner at all times after Faith had disappeared. Two long, endless days passed and the silence and dread that filled the air was nearly palpable. Giles and Willow studied. Vi and Amanda sparred. And Buffy and Spike watched. Spike’s restlessness filled Buffy with an itchy sensation that made her desperate to do something, anything. So she pulled Spike up to their room and attacked his lips with vigor.

He stared at her in horror when she fumbled with his zipper. “Buffy, I really can’t.”

“You keep saying that,” she pouted, bending down to change his mind. But he pushed her away and raced out of the room like he was being chased by a monster, leaving her alone.

She was filled with terror when she realized that he, too, would be on his own, and when he found him sparring with Vi and Amanda, she smacked him hard on the chest and wept in his arms.

He gazed at her like she was his savior, and she ran soft fingers through his hair, her eyes shining with tears. “Can we talk about this?” she finally whispered, but before he could open his mouth to respond, Willow was crying out from the basement and Giles was screaming something unintelligible. They were gone before Buffy could reach the stairs.

The three slayers and the vampire huddled together that night. No one dared to break the fearful silence that had settled over them oppressively, not until Spike began crooning to them. He sang Sid Vicious and kept it soft and comforting, which made Buffy laugh and want to kiss him despite the other two girls present.

Vi and Amanda disappeared into the next room, sensing their need for privacy, and Buffy wrapped herself around Spike, careful not to touch anywhere that might set him off and upset him. They fell into a blissful embrace, and that was when Buffy felt it calling to her, pleading for her to listen and come to it and help, help, help...

“We need to go,” Spike stated unnecessarily, and they moved quietly toward the basement, making sure not to wake Amanda or Vi from where they slumbered on the couch.

This time, the room in the basement was pulsating with power, a whirling blue vortex within.

They looked at each other. “Do we jump?” Spike asked, but there was no question about it.

“We jump,” Buffy said softly, and they clutched each other’s hands and jumped to oblivion.

--

They landed in a dark, empty world where lightning flashed above and below the craggy mountain they stood upon. Ahead of them, a boy not much older than Dawn huddled over a corpse, clutching something Buffy couldn’t quite see in his right hand.

“Hello,” Buffy tried. “Have you seen some other people around here recently?”

The boy whipped his head around to glare at them. “They’re all going to die,” he hissed. “All of them!”

“Are they still alive?” Buffy asked, hope flooding her for the first time since Kennedy was infected. “Where are they?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the boy said coldly. “Jasmine will stop them. They can’t be saved, not anymore.” He turned fully, and Buffy saw what he held- a sharpened knife, dripping with blood. Behind him, she could now see that the corpse wasn’t a corpse. It was a woman, her dress torn and her stomach sliced open. “Never!” the boy shouted, and then he was racing toward them at an impossible speed, and Buffy was frozen in place as she recognized the body as Cordelia Chase, and then the knife was struck firmly into Spike’s hand, where he’d tried to block it, and Buffy’s stomach, where it had barely pricked.

Spike knocked the boy to the ground, wrenching the knife from his hand. “Who are you?” he demanded, fury glinting in his eyes as he glanced back at Buffy’s wound.

“Does it matter?” the boy asked dully. He didn’t try to rise. Instead, he pointed upwards, toward a structure in the distance. “They’re all there. I told them not to go, to just give up and die. And now they’re going to try to destroy her.”

“Cordelia?” Buffy asked, her eyes still glued to her old classmate’s body.

The boy laughed, and it came out with a sob. “Can’t you tell? She’s already gone.”

“Jasmine, then?” Spike guessed.

“She’s good,” the boy whispered. “She’s doing good. She has to be. Cordy said that she was good. Cordy said!”

Spike’s eyes nearly softened. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” he asked gently.

The boy stared up at him, his eyes red. “I have to!” he cried out, crawling back to Cordelia, murmuring “Cordycordycordycordy” the whole way.

Buffy tugged on Spike’s arm. “Let’s go find the others,” she said softly, and he gave her an unreadable look and followed.

They walked for what seemed like hours and eventually days until they reached the structure. Buffy pushed open the door and inched inside.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise after seeing Cordelia at the bottom of the mountain and the stacks of blood bags in the refrigerator, but Buffy was still stunned to see Angel lying unconscious on the floor. “Angel…” she breathed.

Spike took a step away from her, and she gave him an annoyed glare and pulled him to her again, kissing him on the cheek and whispering in his ear, “You’re mine.”

“Yes,” he said simply, and she frowned, because he never repeated her words. “Am I yours?” she asked plaintively.

He looked away. “Now isn’t the time. We need to find the others.”

But they were all there, sprawled out across the floor, Rona and Xander and Faith and Giles and Willow, along with others Buffy didn’t recognize by anything but Angel’s descriptions, once upon a resurrection ago. Gunn, Fred, Lorne, and could that really be Wesley?

“They’re all alive,” Spike told her. “Just…gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we bring them back?” She knelt beside Willow, sweeping long orange hair behind her ear to gaze down at her friend’s face.

“I think we should be wondering how to keep from ending up where they are instead, love,” Spike said cautiously from where he stood behind her.

“Yeah.” She stood again, a little unsteady as Spike put a supporting arm around her waist. Their eyes met, and they both stood still, drawing closer and closer together by a hypnotic attraction that pulled them to each other.

Then she was kissing him and he was kissing her, and they were flying through the room like they once had almost two years before, throwing each other back as the kisses and embraces grew more passionate, and Buffy wanted to cry as Spike tore into her clothing, yanking it off of her uncaring of the way that she gasped in pain at how rough he was being. But she couldn’t reject him, not now that he was finally accepting her, and she started peppering kisses up and down his neck and chest.

Spike split open her panties and shoved his manhood into her wet center with so much force that her head smashed backward into the stone wall with a sickening sound that, had she not been the slayer, would have meant that her skull was split open. “I’m yours!” she tried to cry out.

“Shut up,” he said coldly, and thrust within her, so deep that she felt fuller than she ever had before. She came with a strangled gasp, her inner walls clenching around him until he came, too, and she came again and again and again…

I love you! she wanted to say. You’re everything to me! But then he was hard again, and back inside her with force, his hands playing with her coarsely and she wanted to cry all over again at how empty it all was. “Let me love you!” she sobbed, and she didn’t realize that she’d said it out loud until he was sneering before her, their faces so close that they were nearly touching. “You can’t love me,” he growled. “You can’t love anything!”

She shuddered against him as she came again, nearly falling forward when he didn’t support her against the wall. “Why won’t you make love to me?” she whimpered, feeling him tense again.

“Because I don’t love you,” he responded coldly, his hands cupping her ass and one finger tracing her second opening.

This isn’t real. This can’t be real. This isn’t- “This isn’t real!” she whispered in relief, pulling herself off of Spike and staggering backward.

He snarled at her. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Of course it’s real!”

“No,” she said with confidence. “It’s not. You love me, I know you do!” She closed her eyes, willing the image away-

-And when she opened them again, she was in the structure still. But now she was pinned against the wall by a long, shining thread that she followed with her eyes back to a horrific demon creature that glared at her with cold eyes. Spike was beside her, also connected to the creature, his eyes moving wildly behind their closed lids as he dreamt. The others too, the ones that she had seen on the floor, were trapped in the monster’s clutches, varying degrees of horror on their faces.

She yanked at the thread that held her in place as the monster watched helplessly, unable to fight back while it held the others in its grasp. It didn’t move, didn’t let her move. Frustrated, she let out a scream that reverberated through the room.

All it does is feed on our nightmares, she realized. So what could possibly drive it away?

She envisioned her friends, alive and laughing around her as she donned a white dress with Dawn- no, can’t use Dawn, she isn’t part of this world- with Willow, smiling at the way she glowed in the mirror.

Then the demon retaliated, and she was standing at the end of the aisle staring down at her husband-to-be, and he was Angel.

She clenched her teeth, imagining Spike throwing open the doors to the church and sweeping her off her feet, taking her somewhere safe-

-But then the demon made it daytime, and Spike was burning in the sun-

-And she threw him into a manhole and followed, her dress sagging in the dirty sewer tunnels. “Maybe I should take that thing off.” Spike smirked wickedly and tore through it, leaving it on the ground, and they were kissing, just kissing, even though she was almost completely naked and he was fully erect, until they’d finally murmured promises of love to each other and then they were moving slowly, affectionately, with all the time in the world to make love-

-And the demon struck, seizing its chance, and Spike’s eyes yellowed and his fangs emerged-

-But she didn’t care, and she pressed him to her neck in ecstasy as he brought her higher and higher, until-

The thread snapped, and Buffy’s eyes flew open. She somersaulted across the room, kicking at the demon’s head at full force as it landed and sending it toppling backward, pulling the threads and their prisoners forward as it moved. She lifted something long and metal from just below Gunn’s form and swung it blindly toward the demon’s head, chopping it and the threads from its body off with one fell swoop.

“Buffy?” Spike was asking from across the room, and he was too far, so she ran to embrace him, the real Spike, her Spike.

He recoiled. “I didn’t mean to!” he cried out. “I couldn’t- I didn’t-“

“Spike…” she crooned, and took his head with both her hands and turned him to face her. “Where were you?”

“Where do you think?” he whispered, backing further away.

The bathroom, robe pulled up as he grabbed violently to her. “I’m gonna make you feel it!”

“I love you,” she said, and was surprised to realize that it was the truth.

“You don’t,” he said quietly, trying to pull his head from her embrace.

But then she kissed him to her and when they parted, both their eyes were very bright. “Oh,” said Spike, and that was all that needed to be said.

“We need to bring the head back to Jasmine,” Wesley was saying from across the room, but Angel wasn’t listening from beside him, instead watching Buffy and Spike with his eyes narrowed. Spike tensed, but Buffy tangled her hand in his and squeezed softly, her eyes fixed on the glowing blue bauble Angel was holding.

“Ready?” Wesley said, and Angel tore his eyes away from the couple and nodded, using a knife to slice open his arm and drip blood over the ball. In an instant, lightning had sprung forth from it, creating a glowing portal in front of them, and Angel raced inside, the head clutched firmly in his hand.

“Connor and Cordy,” the girl Buffy thought was Fred reminded them as they all stood quietly, musing.

Vi burst into the structure, Amanda right behind her. “They’re gone,” she told them, looking around. “Went back through the portal. The boy- Connor?- he said that there was no one left. What happened to all of you?”

They all stared at each other, unable to respond.

Angel retrieved them a few hours later, and Giles and Xander left LA immediately to retrieve their bus and belongings from the safehouse they’d all used. Angel tried to pull Buffy over to talk, but she avoided him. He’d probably want to speak to her alone, just like the others had tried after the battle with the First.

But she was never alone anymore.

And now she was somewhere far from California, in the backseat of an ancient DeSoto with the one thing she still needed in life cradled in her arms.

She rested her head against her lover’s body and kissed him awake, smiling as his eyes fluttered open.

She was done with the fighting, with saving the world and fighting her worst nightmares and the terrifying bliss that had been Jasmine’s attack.

This was true bliss.

--

The demon relaxed the thread of glowing light that had been fighting to stay alive as the yellow-haired girl had fought it. But she’d eventually succumbed, as all did. It might have been easier to manufacture the worst with the others. But this one…she’d been living an endless nightmare for so long that she could react even within her worst imaginings. It had had to create a happy reality for her.

Its prisoners intact, it waited patiently for something new to feed on, something planning to fight it.

It waited a long time.