Three months on now and my world is still ended.

It ended the night she died.

Not literally. Her death restored the dimensional walls, and the hellish effects were minimal. Within a few days everything was back to normal.

Except my world had ended.

I remember lying on my slab, slowly healing from breaking half the bones in my body, thinking, 'So what? You loved her and never really had her and lost her. A few days, a few more pints of good, healing blood, and it'll be time to move on. Get out of this hellhole and make a new start and forget about her.'

What an ass I was.

I think I was trying to convince myself that my feelings for Buffy hadn't been real, that it would be easy to get over her death and move on. After all, I'd managed to move on after Dru dumped me, and I had loved her for over a hundred years.

A few months of sick infatuation with my natural enemy couldn't possibly be real.

Tell that to my painfully constricted heart. It doesn't beat, but it can love. Some kind of weird fucking paradox or something.

I never did leave Sunnydale. A few days after her death, I was hobbling around my crypt trying to restore the strength to my shattered leg, when the door opened and I found the last Summers' woman flinging herself at me, clinging to me and burying her sobs in my chest like the child she no longer was.

And I started crying, too, burying my face in her hair and smelling that oh so familiar scent of Summers blood and vanilla.

Dawn had always smelled like baby powder, teenage angst and violets.

Now she wore her sister's scent, a woman's scent.

And she cried the tears of a woman who had lost everything.

And I remembered my promise.

So, I stayed in Sunnydale to protect Dawn.

Why would a demon keep any kind of promise to a mortal? I've been asking myself that for the last three months. What kind of demon am I anymore?

Doc confronted me on that platform with the fact that I have no soul. He was surprised that I would try to protect a human, try to stop the world from going to hell.

My facetious little theory about happy meals on legs and Manchester United just doesn't play anymore. Maybe it never did.

I like this world because I'm a part of this world, and there's more humanity in me than there should be. I don't have any clue why. Perhaps Dru's mad demon wasn't able to fully infect me. Perhaps the slayer blood I've drank has changed me. Perhaps the poet in me refused to die.

Hell, I don't know, and I don't have the time to figure it out.

I do know that, just as Buffy always had a problem killing vampires she knew, I always had a problem killing humans I knew. I never killed my family, breaking a long standing tradition in our clan. Dru killed Cecily for me, and I had never even thought of going after her.

Sure, over the last few years I've done plenty of threatening. 'Once I get this chip out...'

That's bullshit and I've known it all along. I couldn't even kill my grandsire. Torture the poof, sure, but not kill him.

I could never kill the Slayer, and once I fell in love with her, all chances of me being able to kill her friends and family dried up. I don't even have any real desire for it anymore.

And one look into Dawn's big, soulful eyes would stop me, anyhow, even if I was in some kind of drunken rage.

Those Summers' women...

It's true, I, the Big Bad, liked middle aged, sometimes frumpy, sometimes sexy as hell Joyce. She was...comfort. Always there with a cup of cocoa and an ear to listen. I don't think Buffy knew just how much time I had spent in her mother's kitchen or at her gallery while she was away at college.

My love for art, literature, theater, poetry had been suppressed for a long time, and Joyce brought it all back out in me.

Looking past the demon, the killer, the unsouled, she liked me.

After she died, I made an unconscious promise to Joyce to protect the remaining Summers' women even from themselves.

It wasn't my promise to Buffy that sent me flying up that tinkertoy to Dawn. And it wasn't my caring for the nibblet.

I couldn't let Joyce down.

But...I did.

No one blamed me, not even Harris, certainly not Dawn.

But, I will never forgive myself. The ritual hadn't begun. If I could have stopped Doc...

Well, we all know what 'ifs and buts' are.

But, the promise still lingers and I remain in Sunnydale, protecting Dawn. And in protecting Dawn, I protect this rotten town.

Word spread quickly of the Slayer's death, and creatures with the smarts enough to stay away from a hellmouth patrolled by a slayer started flocking here. With the only active slayer rotting in jail, there was a vacuum.

I filled it.

I get to take my aggression, frustration and anger out without fear of my head exploding. If I'm betraying my "kind", that really doesn't bother me, as long as no one kicks the shit out of me for doing it.

Since I spend my free time hanging around the magic shop instead of Willies, and Dawn keeps me supplied with blood and Giles buys me booze and smokes so I don't have to frequent the places my "kind" hangs out at, I'm pretty safe.

Safe. That's just a bizarre state of being for a demon. Comfortable. Ditto.

Miserable.

I figure I'll feel that way for the rest of my existence.

It's not wholly for Dawn that I fight the good fight, or my promise to Joyce or in her memory, or even for Buffy. I fight and slay because it fills the nights. When I'm fighting, I can't help thinking of her, but at least I'm doing something. If I just sat around on my ass moping, I'd probably stake myself.

It's never going to stop hurting, is it.

Dawn asked me that a few weeks after Buffy's death, but it's something I ask myself nightly.

I don't know why I loved her, but I know that love was real. She never returned it, and she probably never would have, but that doesn't cheapen the way I felt. It wasn't a pure love, a holy love. It was down and dirty and lusty and still makes my heart ache with longing.

It's probably easy to dismiss as lust, except that only about half the time I think about Buffy do I think about sex with Buffy. I remember our one, true kiss, how gentle and tender and totally nonsexual it was. A kiss of gratitude. I think at that moment that she knew I was there for her and Dawn.

I remember fighting alongside her as much as against her, all the times admiring her technique, her wit and smart mouth. I remember holding her on my lap when we were under that love spell and thinking that this was what unlife should be.

And I remember her coming to me to help her steal an RV and get the hell out of Dodge. She looked me in the eye and said, 'I need you, Spike.'

I would never have loved her more than at that moment, even if someday she had professed her undying love for me.

She needed me.

And I jumped to help her.

So, I guess it only makes sense that I now fight alongside her mates, protecting the town she hated and loved with equal fervor, watching over her little sister.

I'll love Buffy and miss her until the day I turn to dust. I know that deep inside myself. There may be other lovers, even other loves, but Buffy stole my undead heart and made it a part of herself.

She took it to her grave the night my world ended.

My world ended, but a new one began and I, like everyone else who was touched by Buffy, is forced to live in it.

Three months on and life is still carrying on. Dawn told me that Buffy told her the hardest thing about the world was living in it. She didn't tell her that was what she wanted for her baby sister, but Dawn's trying to live. We're all trying to live.

In Buffy's memory, with Buffy's love, we have to live, in the new world she forged with her death.

End

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