Buffy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was hard enough to swallow that the events of the last few hours had actually taken place!
Earlier that evening she had been supposedly on patrol with Spike trying to track down the responsible party for the massacre on the train. She hadn’t even taken notice to the fact that he had ditched his usual ensemble of black for a much more becoming outfit that looked like it had come straight from a J. Crew catalog. Becoming? No, becoming was not the word for it. It was just different, but she didn’t find it appealing in anyway! Instead of finding the vampire the had ripped the throats out of every single person on the train, she had ended up running off what had to have been two of the most pathetic vampires she had ever seen. These guys actually made Harmony look reasonably intelligent.
After their hasty departure, she had finally come to the realization that she had been set up. Spike had managed to find these fledglings holed up in an abandon warehouse and used them simply as an excuse to get her alone. Of course, Spike wasted no time proving what she had thought was just Dawn’s teenage romantic fantasy!
He had actually told her he was in love with her! How could she have missed it!? Granted, she’d been preoccupied with protecting Dawn from Glory and her mother’s illness, but that was no excuse! She was the Slayer, the Chosen One. She couldn’t afford to let things go unnoticed! Now all the pieces were coming together. Helping the Scoobies, letting her cry on his shoulder when she heard just how bad her mom’s health really was, helping the victims at the Bronze after Olaf’s rampage, showing her Riley’s little blood-sucking get away, what had she been thinking? That he was doing it out of the goodness of his heart?! Goodness was one quality Spike didn’t possess!
Buffy had pondered these thoughts over and over after she had stormed out of the warehouse. She had walked the dark streets of Sunnydale for a good two hours, not really patrolling, but she wouldn’t have minded taking on a herd of vampires at that point. She wouldn’t have minded alphabetizing Giles entire library, if it meant getting her mind off that infuriating blond vampire!
Of all nights for the Hellmouth to decide to take a vacation! Finally, she had decided to head home. She knew there was no way she was going to get to sleep, but it beat roaming about the streets all night, her mind too preoccupied to notice if anything did actually sneak up on her.
Buffy approached the house slowly, her eyes scanning the shadows for any signs of Spike lurking about her house. His usual spot by the tree just outside of her window was vacant. For a vampire over a century old, his lurking skills did leave a bit much to be desired. How many times had she looked out the window to see him just standing there or left for class only to find her yard littered with cigarette butts?
She sprinted up the stairs hoping to get to the door and safely inside before he would have a chance to jump out from his hiding place had she managed to miss him. She apparently had developed a gift for missing the glaringly obvious, so it would have been no surprise if she had missed him lying in wait in some gloomy corner.
She spotted a light flickering through the sheer curtains of the living room. Apparently, either her mom or Dawn or both had decided to wait up for her. The only light she could see through the window was the wavering light emitted by the television. If she were lucky, they had fallen asleep by this late hour, and she could sneak by unnoticed to the safety of her room.
She wanted to talk to someone about this, but her mother and Dawn were out of the question. Her mother already had enough to worry about with being sick. She didn’t need to worry about her oldest daughter fending off the unwanted advances of a neutered vampire. Dawn, on the other hand, she already had such a crush on Spike. She would have probably leaded his cheering section! There was only one person she could really talk to at this point, and hopefully she’d be awake and willing to come over. That was a rather foolish thought. After all the nightly missions the Scoobies had been through, Willow would probably be shocked to receive a call from her with a request as simple as ‘I need someone to talk to!’
Buffy entered the house as quickly and quietly as she could. The hinges of the front door, normally silent during the day, squeaked deafeningly—at least to her ears. She walked slowly towards the stairs hoping she wouldn’t encounter any squeaky floorboards along her path. There were only the muffled sounds of the television coming from the living room to disturb the late night peace of the house, but so far no questioning voices to greet her arrival. Softly she placed her foot on the first step. She was home free…
“Buffy?” Dawn’s questioning voice floated through the doorway leading to the living room. Instantly, Buffy’s heart sunk. It was long past Dawn’s bedtime, and it was a school night. Why couldn’t she ever listen to the rules like a normal teenager? Okay, staying up past your bedtime and not listening to the rules was a part of being a normal teenager. Buffy should have known that better than anyone.
“What are you doing still up?” Buffy asked tossing her jacket over the banister and entering the living room to join Dawn who was sitting on the couch wrapped in a blanket from her bed.
“Did you find them?” Dawn asked her eyelids at half-mast. She was obviously fighting to stay awake, but Buffy knew it would do no good to tell her to head to bed.
“No,” Buffy sighed flopping down into the closest chair. “Wrong vamps. Didn’t even get a chance to dust them.”
Dawn observed her sister. She was being extremely quiet, and she was getting the distinct impression that it wasn’t just because Mom was upstairs sleeping. She was sitting there staring down at her hands, which were clenched so tightly in her lap that her knuckles were turning white. Something more had happened while her sister was out. The fact that she wasn’t going on her usual tirade after spending time with Spike lead Dawn to believe it had everything to do with him.
“What’s wrong, Buffy?” she asked knowing it wasn’t going to be that easy, but her sister hadn’t ordered her to bed yet. Clearly she wanted to talk to someone, and at the moment she was the only someone in the near vicinity.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Buffy replied too quickly to be telling the truth.
“It’s about Spike isn’t it?” Buffy’s head snapped up at these words. Dawn fell panic start to churn in the pit of her stomach. “He’s not hurt, is he?”
“No,” Buffy answered rolling her eyes in frustration. “I couldn’t be that lucky!”
“Buffy, what happened?” Dawn demanded. Her sister was really starting to worry her. She’d always been tightlipped about the slaying thing around her—mom’s orders, but she could sense that this had to do with something more than just a night of frolicking in the cemetery dusting evil bad guys. Dawn knew Spike had something to do with her foul mood just from her tone of voice, and the fact that he hadn’t accompanied Buffy home. She’d never let Buffy know, but she had heard them bickering on the porch in the wee hours of the morning after returning from patrol. Slowly, the pieces were coming together and starting to make sense. Dawn had known she had been right about him all along. Had he finally admitted it? Of course, he had! She hadn’t thought much of it, other than he had looked incredibly hot, when he had shown up at the house to pick Buffy up for patrol. What other reason was there for the new clothes, the changed hairstyle, and now Buffy’s rotten mood?
“Nothing happened,” Buffy insisted getting up from the chair and heading for the kitchen. She had seen the smirk on Dawn’s face. She’d already figured it out. Sometimes she really hated those monks! This would have been an excellent time to be an only child!
“It’s not nothing!” Dawn cried as she followed her to the kitchen. “Tell me what he did!”
Buffy propped the phone receiver on her shoulder, and turned to face Dawn who was leaning on the counter expectantly. “He didn’t do anything, and you should be in bed!”
“Who are you calling?” Dawn decided to try another line of questioning.
“Willow, if you must know,” she told her sister curtly and began to dial. Then added as it began to ring on the other end, “Now go to bed.”
Dawn rolled her eyes at that comment and gave her big sis a sly grin. “I’m not going anywhere until you fill me in on what you and Spike did this evening.”
Buffy paced off the kitchen for about the fifth time in fifteen minutes. Dawn and Willow were both sitting at the kitchen table nursing cups of cocoa minus the marshmallows. Apparently Spike had managed to finish the last of them during his last visit. Even when he wasn’t there he was a pain in her ass one way or another!
Willow rolled her eyes as the Slayer made her next lap past her chair. Buffy had been very cryptic over the phone, but she had sounded almost frantic so Willow had left a note for Tara and came straight over to the Summers’ home. From the ranting Buffy had done when she couldn’t find any marshmallows for the cocoa, she was fairly sure Spike was the reason that the Slayer was so upset. Now if she would just tell her what was wrong, it would be a step in the right direction. It was nice to have a girls’ night out and all that, but Willow did have class in the morning. She’d never been late for something as important as school in her life, and it would throw her entire day out of whack if she missed the beginning of her philosophy lecture. You never knew what might be on the test!
“Buffy could you be stationary for just a few minutes?” Willow broke the silence. “I’m starting to get motion sickness!”
“I’m sorry, Will,” Buffy answered stopping behind Dawn’s chair. Her fingers grasped the edge of it tightly, and Willow wondered between her stress and her Slayer strength how long it would be before the chair began to splinter. “I’m just keyed up. I can’t believe this happened! That man…that vamp…”
“You mean Spike?” Willow asked helpfully.
“Yes, Spike,” Buffy nearly cried, but caught herself. Joyce was still asleep, and she hoped to keep it that way. It was bad enough she couldn’t get the pest AKA Dawn to go to bed.
“What did he do this time?” This was quickly getting frustrating. Buffy wanted to talk, and now Willow was lucky if she could get her friend to talk in more than two word sentences!
“What did he do!” Buffy repeated tossing her blond mane over her shoulder with an angry snap.
“Well, yeah,” Willow muttered taking another sip of her quickly cooling cocoa.
“I’ll tell you what he did,” she answered through clenched teeth as she resumed her course about the kitchen. “That undead pain in my—butt,” she changed the last word when her next lap around the kitchen had her looking in Dawn’s direction. She had enough problems without receiving a lecture in the morning about using curse words in front of her little sister. “He said he’s in love with me!” Willow gagged on her last swallow of cocoa at that statement. She had to place a hand over her lips to keep from spraying the kitchen table with the liquid. “Our entire patrol was nothing but a set up! We sat in that stupid clunker he calls a car for over an hour, and then when we found the vampires they were nothing but two losers who couldn’t have been more than a week old! Lord, I was on a date with him, and I didn’t even know it! How gross is that?”
Will waited a minute before she spoke, not quite sure if Buffy was finished with her latest rant or not. “Well, he’s not that bad…” she stopped short when Buffy glared at her. “I…I mean ew! Definitely, ew! But come on, Buffy, you must have miss understood! Did he actually say ‘I love you’? I mean maybe he meant you know, ‘like a friend’ or something like that?”
“Well, he didn’t actually say it. I stopped him before he could actually get the entire sentence out, but he was going to! Come on, Will. He even told me he dreams about me! Just thinking what we might have been doing in those dreams makes me want to take a scalding shower!” Buffy collapsed onto the closest chair. Apparently now that things were out in the open she could manage to stay stationary.
“Well,” Willow paused a minute to think. She really didn’t want to say the wrong thing. If Buffy got upset again, they were going to have to spend another half hour watching her do laps about the kitchen again. “Didn’t you suspect anything? This couldn’t have just happened overnight. Spike’s not just going to wake up one morning, and boom, he’s in love with the Slayer…”
“No, I didn’t have a clue,” Buffy claimed.
“Oh, come on,” Dawn interrupted. “You had to know! You just didn’t want to admit it!”
Willow cocked an eyebrow giving Buffy that looked that said ‘Good point’ without having to say a word. Buffy shifted uneasily on her chair. Okay, so there had been signs, which she had chosen to ignore, but that wasn’t the point! What happened to bashing Spike? She had this nasty, blood-sucking demon claiming to be in love with her! It really didn’t matter how or when it happened! They could at least mention a few more ‘how could he’s’ or ‘that’s disgusting’s’!
“Okay, maybe I did overlook a few things…Okay, a bunch of things,” she added after she saw Dawn open her mouth to add her two cents. She’d already been over the events of the past couple of months in her mind about a thousand times. She really didn’t want to go over them again! “But that’s not the point, Will. He’s a vampire!”
“Angel was a vampire,” Willow added quietly stating the obvious.
“He was different,” Buffy cried complete forgetting about Joyce trying to sleep upstairs. “He had a soul. He wasn’t a killer!”
“Spike has a chip,” Willow shot back, “and he hasn’t killed anybody in a while.”
“There’s a big difference between a soul and a chip, Will,” Buffy stood up and began to pace again. Willow thought she kind of looked like a lawyer preparing to address a jury. In a way, she supposed they were the jury, and Buffy was going to convince them why she couldn’t and/or shouldn’t fall for Spike. “What happens when he manages to get the chip out? He’ll go right back to killing…”
“Kind of like Angelus did?” Willow asked sadly remembering her pet fish.
“That was different.”
“How?” Dawn shot her sister a glare. They had managed to keep her fairly safe from Angelus, but she remembered how he had tortured Buffy. She walked through the house jumping at the site of her own shadow. From what information she had managed to get from the Scoobies, Angelus made anything Spike had done look rather friendly.
Buffy returned the glare, but remained silent, unable to really think of a suitable reply. Finally, another thought came to mind, “He broke Riley and I up! Probably because of this stupid crush!”
Willow rolled her eyes. How had she known that was going to come into the conversation? She loved Xander with all her heart, but she had to admit that she thought his little lecture to Buffy right before Riley had left was really out of line. “Now, don’t go blaming the messenger,” Willow said sternly. “I’m sorry, but it wasn’t Spike’s fault that Riley was jealous…”
“Jealous?!” Buffy cried, but Willow continued before she could continue her denial.
“Yes, jealous! He was jealous of your strength, and he nearly got himself killed when he refused to see that doctor. Then to say you were ignoring him! Your mother was having brain surgery for Christ’s sake! So he decides that it’s because you have this hang up on Angel, and lets some vamp suck on him. If Spike hadn’t told you about it, you would have found out eventually. Probably when he either was dead or turned into a vamp!”
“Okay, Will,” Buffy interrupted raising her arms in defeat. “You’re right about Riley. He definitely wasn’t my perfect match, but Spike isn’t either!”
“How do you know?” Dawn asked. “You never gave him a chance.”
“She’s right Buffy,” Will agreed. “You really should at least go talk to him.”
Buffy sighed. They were right. She hated to say it, but they were. She had been pretty harsh with him, but it’s not every day your mortal enemy decides to tell you he was in love with you! He didn’t have a chance, but after all he’d done for her family, he at least deserved to be let down easy.
“Okay, I’ll talk to him,” Buffy replied. “But to let him down easy,” she added noting Dawn’s hopeful look. “I’m not in love with him.”
Buffy walked quickly to the back door. She wanted to get this episode of her life over with as quickly as possible. She turned around so quickly, she missed Will and Dawn’s smiles, and Dawn mouth the words, “Sure, she doesn’t.” across the table.
Once again Buffy found herself roaming the dark streets of Sunnydale. Twice already, she had stopped and turned towards home. Both times she had forced herself to return to her trek towards the cemetery. Hiding at home wasn’t going to do any good. Will was right at least on one thing; she had to set Spike straight and the sooner the better.
There wasn’t anything between them—a working relationship at best. There couldn’t be anything more! Sure, he was reasonably attractive. Not dark and moody like Angel, and the Billy Idol meets Sid Vicious look was a bit dated, but she had to admit for being over a hundred years old, he had kept himself in incredible shape. He had the most piercing blue eyes, and the accent when he wasn’t telling someone to “sod off” was rather appealing. She could almost picture the timid poet he had been before he had the misfortune to run into Drusilla. The type of guy her mom would have loved to see her bring home to meet the family. He had probably been kind and doting when it came to the woman he chose to share his affection, not the macho type, and feeling like less of a man simply because she was the Slayer. She doubted he would ever think of cheating on her.
Buffy stopped dead in her tracks, the street light above shrouding her in a hazy yellow spotlight. God, what had she just been thinking!? She was going to Spike’s crypt to tell him he had no chance. She could never love him, and here she was strolling down the street all but singing his praises, and the thoughts about his body! She should be slapped! Obviously, she must have lost her mind! Where was Xander when you needed a good Spike insult! He would have kept her on track!
Sure he was cute, but anybody could be cute. That didn’t mean she felt anything for him! Dracula had been more than passingly attractive, that didn’t mean she had wanted to fly of to Transylvania and set up castle keeping!
She had to get this over with as quickly as possible. She was obviously tired. Why else all these crazy thoughts about that annoying vampire! She resumed walking towards the cemetery. Her pace was a little quicker. The faster she got there the less time she would have to come up with anymore traitorous thoughts about him! She wanted him gone from her life for good. The best move would have been if he left Sunnydale all together, but Buffy couldn’t afford to let him do that at the moment. She really didn’t know what she was going to say to him. What do you say when a bloodthirsty demon declares his undying love for you? She couldn’t let him get to her—like he always managed to do. She couldn’t be too harsh. Spike had to know that he was being delusional about his feelings for her, but she couldn’t upset him enough that he did actually leave town. As much as she hated to admit it, at least in one way she did need him. Other than herself, he was the only one who stood any chance against Glory. If something happened to her, she needed to know that someone would be there to protect Dawn. The Scoobies would step in without hesitation, but they weren’t going to be a match for Glory.
So caught up in her thoughts, she found that she had already reached Spike’s crypt. She played with the thought of possibly making another lap around the cemetery. It wouldn’t hurt! You never knew when a vampire might rise out of the grave. Maybe she should just make one last check before she went inside.
“Grow up, Buffy,” she whispered to herself. It was ridiculous that she felt this nervous! She’d never had any trouble talking to him before. Of course, on those other occasions the discussions usually were followed by them exchanging blows. None of their other conversations had started out with the phrase, ‘I know you love me but…”
squawks
05/18/17 04:16 am
pj! I remember wishing one of your stories would be finished seriously about a decade ago. Amazing. I just tried an old password I used to use and amazingly got in too. Memories!
pj
03/20/17 01:20 am
10 yrs later, i finally rem my username and password. Pari, you rock. Hope you are well.
Rabbit_moon1
12/23/16 01:12 pm
I donate every month. Please donate to keep this site up!
AudryDaluz1
10/06/16 08:34 am
Great post.
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:45 pm
And anyone else who loves this site, it's worth mentioning there's a nifty little "Donate" option just below the shout box here! ;)
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:43 pm
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Pari and all the mods for maintaining such a great site!
05/18/17 04:16 am
pj! I remember wishing one of your stories would be finished seriously about a decade ago. Amazing. I just tried an old password I used to use and amazingly got in too. Memories!
pj
03/20/17 01:20 am
10 yrs later, i finally rem my username and password. Pari, you rock. Hope you are well.
Rabbit_moon1
12/23/16 01:12 pm
I donate every month. Please donate to keep this site up!
AudryDaluz1
10/06/16 08:34 am
Great post.
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:45 pm
And anyone else who loves this site, it's worth mentioning there's a nifty little "Donate" option just below the shout box here! ;)
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:43 pm
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Pari and all the mods for maintaining such a great site!