Sequel to Loves Lost

Title: Love Awakened (3/8/06)

Author: Slaymesoftly

Rating: NC17, eventually

Word count: 24,580

Season: AU season II, no spoilers

Disclaimer and distribution: The characters and Sunnydale belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy and large corporations that have so much more money than I do. This particular story about those characters belongs to me and may be archived if you already have permission to take my stuff. If not, just ask, I’ll probably say “yes.”

Many thanks to the overworking Always_jbj who took the time to read through this and try to save me from possible embarrassment.

AN: This is a sequel to another short story in which Angelus and Dru are both dusted, and Spike is still crippled. Buffy had been badly abused by the vampires at the behest of Ethan Rayne, who has been defeated by Giles and taken away to be punished. It picks up as Buffy arrives home after her ordeal. It will probably be part of a series of three or four stories, each of which edges closer to Spuffiness, but perhaps keeping the harsher tone of the original story.

Love Awakened

. Chapter One:

It took a great many soothing assurances that she was fine and nods of agreement from Willow and Xander to calm Joyce down enough to even listen to Buffy’s offer to explain both her lengthy absence and her current appearance. Insisting that she not call the police, Buffy offered to give Joyce a full explanation if she would just allow her to get cleaned up and dressed first. Buffy left her mother with a very nervous Willow and Xander and ran upstairs to step gratefully into a hot shower.

As she washed the blood, ash and smoke out of her hair and off her body, she had time to go back over the events of the past twenty-four hours and the full impact of what had happened began to sink in. Before long she had slid down the wall and was huddled under the water sobbing uncontrollably for all that she had lost. For the first time since she had been told it was prophesied that the master would kill her, she felt the full weight of her calling.

( No one told me I would be raped by a man – vampire- I thought was in love with me. No one told me that I would have to kill someone I thought was the love of my life. And no one told me that one of the vampires I’m supposed to fear the most would turn out to be the only sympathetic creature in the room.)

When her mother began to knock on the door, her voice a mixture of anger and fear, the Slayer left completely and only a sobbing teenager was left to try to respond to Joyce’s increasingly frantic questions. Finally throwing off the last vestiges of respect for her daughter’s privacy, she threw open the door and plunged into the water to pull the sobbing girl out into her lap.

There were no words exchanged as Buffy sobbed out her heartbreak and her delayed reaction to her treatment at the hands of the sorcerer and his demon accomplices; Joyce just held her tightly and rocked her back and forth as she had done when her little girl was much younger. While Xander remained downstairs, his hormonal urges to peek at Buffy in the shower losing out to his fear of reprisal from Willow and/or Joyce, the redhead ventured cautiously upstairs and stood in the doorway wringing her hands.

Joyce looked up over her sobbing daughter’s head and asked softly, “Can you tell me what happened to her, Willow?”

The novice witch shook her head slowly. “Only in a vague, it-was-really-bad-but-I-wasn’t-there-and-she-didn’t-tell-me kind of way,” she said regretfully.

“Where were you, then? And how did you know how to find her and bring her home?”

“Well, Giles actually—“

“Giles? Mr. Giles, the school librarian? Did he do this?” Joyce’s voice went up and her eyes began to express a sincere desire to remove the librarian’s important body parts.

“Wha-? Oh! No! No, no. Not Giles. Somebody he kn..knows. He knew where to find them, but I guess we didn’t get there in time to keep Angelus from---“

“Angelus? And keep him from what? Is this person under arrest now?”

“Um…no, I think Buffy probably kil….” Willow’s voice trailed off as she realized the hole she was digging. She put on her perkiest face and said quickly, “You know what? The only people who can really explain this are Buffy and Giles. I think Xander and I will go look for Giles right now. That’s a good idea, isn’t it? We’ll find Giles and he’ll explain everything!”

Before Joyce could argue with her, she whirled and ran back down the stairs, grabbing Xander by the sleeve as she bolted out the door.

Almost growling in frustration, Joyce abandoned the hope of learning more from Willow in favor of continuing to comfort her obviously distraught daughter. As she held Buffy and rocked her gently, her eyes ran over the girl’s naked body and she shuddered at the partially closed wounds that she could see everywhere, including, it seemed, places she would have hoped her young daughter had never exposed to the outside world. The scarring on Buffy’s throat from what had obviously been a painful gash there caused an unpleasant flashback to their last year in Los Angeles and Buffy’s attempt to make her parents believe in vampires.

With a shudder, Joyce suppressed fleeting thought that perhaps Buffy had been telling the truth; instead, she chose to worry that the “cult” into which she and Hank had thought their daughter had fallen had followed them to Sunnydale. Buffy’s nakedness, and the heartbroken sobbing that was just beginning to trail off to ragged gulps for air, led to only one conclusion as to what else might have happened to her teenaged child, and Joyce unconsciously tightened her grip as she silently vowed retribution on whomever had taken her daughter’s innocence.

As Buffy gradually cried herself out, she realized with some embarrassment that she was sitting, wet and naked, on her mother’s lap curled up like a two-year-old. With a rueful sniffle, she sat up and looked at her mother apologetically.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t know I was going to lose it like that.”

“It’s all right, honey. That’s what mothers are for.” Joyce smiled tentatively. “Are you ready to tell me what happened and who I have to kill?”

Buffy’s quiet, “Already done,” did nothing to reassure her mother about the events of the past twenty-four hours, but she smothered her urge to scream, “What do you mean?” nodding and standing up instead.

“I’ll give you a few minutes to get cleaned up and dressed,” she said quietly, “then I expect you to meet me downstairs and tell me exactly what happened and where you have been. Is that clear?”

Buffy nodded silently and bent over the sink to wash her tear-stained face. A full day of nudity in front of strangers had left her with no inhibitions about standing naked in front of her mother. Knowing it was too late to hide her cuts and bruises, she put her efforts toward organizing her thoughts as she wondered how much to explain.

Joyce picked up the abandoned tee shirt, recoiling slightly at the dried blood and smell of smoke. As she went to leave the room with it in her hand, Buffy’s voice stopped her.

‘Where are you taking that?” There was just the trace of panic in her tone.

“I’m going to throw it away,” Joyce said calmly. “It’s filthy and disgusting and it isn’t yours, so it’s going into the trash right now.”

“No,” Buffy said softly, pulling it out of her mother’s hands. “I’ll wash it. Spi- he might need it,” she added quietly.

Her mother’s face darkened at the reminder that it was clearly a man’s tee shirt, but she bit her tongue and forced herself to leave the bathroom. After a quick stop in her own bedroom to change out of her now-wet clothes, she went to the kitchen and began to make hot chocolate for them to drink during what was sure to be an unpleasant conversation.

The Slayer looked into the mirror and saw the scrubbed face of a teen-age girl looking back at her; in that face were the eyes of someone much older and she shuddered once for the loss of her innocence and youth before squaring her shoulders and turning her back on her reflection. Leaving the bathroom, she quickly pulled some sweats from a drawer in her room, covering all traces of the torture inflicted on her body except for the still tender wound on her neck.

By the time she got downstairs, Joyce was waiting for her with a steaming cup of hot chocolate and a grilled cheese sandwich which Buffy grabbed gratefully, her rumbling stomach reminding her that all she’d had to eat in over a day were Spike’s stale cookies. She tore into the sandwich, shrugging apologetically at her mother for her inability to speak immediately. As soon as her stomach was more content, Buffy slowed her eating and took a sip of her drink before looking at her mother with determination.

“How much do you want to know?” she surprised the woman by asking.

“Wha-? Everything,” Joyce stated firmly. “I want to know everything. How could you think otherwise?”

“You didn’t the last time,” Buffy said pointedly, dashing any hopes Joyce might have had that this current problem had nothing to do with Buffy’s activities in Los Angeles.

“Are we going to be talking about vampires again?” she asked in a tightly controlled voice. “Because you know I don’t—“

Buffy interrupted her mother by tipping her head to the side and displaying the still-open wound on her neck.

“This was not done by a stray dog,” she said quietly. “Or by a ‘vampire wannabe’, Mom. It was done by a vampire. A very old, very dangerous vampire who was trying to drain me.”

“Buffy…” Joyce’s voice held the beginning traces of anger. “We went through this before. There are no such things as vampires.”

“Mom, there are vampires; and demons and werewolves and witches and magic. I know it’s hard to believe, and I’m sorry you had to find out about it this way, but if you can’t accept the truth of that statement, then we can’t have a conversation about this.”

Joyce struggled with her urge to run to the phone and call the hospital for a referral to the nearest psychiatrist. They had actually done that the first time Buffy tried to tell them about vampires and something about her being “called” to “slay” the creatures, but after a few days in the hospital Buffy had recanted and offered an explanation that struck everyone as reasonable, thus convincing them to release her. The burning down of the school gymnasium could not be directly attributed to Buffy as no one had actually seen her set the fire and it could have been accidental. Joyce and Hank had kept their own knowledge of Buffy’s admission of guilt to themselves and she had been allowed to take Buffy and move to Sunnydale with no interference from the authorities.

Now, here they were, safely settled in this lovely, small city and here was her daughter, covered in strange-looking wounds and claiming, once again, that there were vampires in the world. With an exaggerated sigh, Joyce met Buffy’s eerily calm and certain eyes, asking, “And I suppose you are going to tell me once again that you are the one chosen to fight these creatures?”

Buffy cocked her head and stared back at her clearly disbelieving mother. “Mom, how long have I been gone?” she asked, seemingly off-topic.

“Well over twenty-four hours, I guess. Why?”

“Look at my wounds,” Buffy said shortly, pulling up her sweatshirt to show the already healed scars and deeper, but already closed slashes and teeth marks. “How long ago do you think I got them?”

Joyce shifted uncomfortably. “Well…”

“Did I have them when you saw me last?” Buffy demanded, her gaze boring into her mother’s doubtful eyes. She could see the rapidly developing confusion on her mother’s face, before the older woman admitted slowly, “N…no, not that I noticed.”

“Think, Mom. I was wearing a skirt and a short-sleeved top. Don’t you think you might have noticed gaping wounds bleeding all over the floor?”

Joyce glared back angrily, not happy about the sarcastic edge in Buffy’s voice, but was forced to admit that all the damage had obviously been acquired since she’d last seen her daughter.

When she didn’t answer, Buffy continued in a softer tone. “Look at them, Mom. Most of them are already just scars and the others are almost healed. By tomorrow you won’t see anything but healed scars, and in another week or so, not even those. Maybe this one,” she added quietly, touching the bite on her neck, “but not the others. Does that strike you as normal healing?”

Joyce shook her head silently, an inexplicable fear gripping her heart as she recognized the truth of what Buffy was telling her. Rather than belabor that point, Buffy stood up and walked over to her much taller and heavier mother.

“Stand up please, Mom,” she said quietly.

When Joyce silently obeyed, Buffy put her hands around her mother’s waist and easily lifted her into the air over her head. She looked up into the frightened face above her and asked plaintively, “Do you believe me now?”

Without waiting for an answer, Buffy lowered the astonished woman to the floor and went back to sit down and finish her sandwich. The room was quiet except for the sound of Buffy’s chewing and the rattle of china as Joyce tried to pick up her hot chocolate with a shaking hand. When Buffy had finished eating and had swallowed the rest of her drink, she looked back at her mother’s horrified face and asked gently, “Are you ready to hear me out now?”

At Joyce’s frightened nod, Buffy relaxed back into her chair and began. “Well, you remember the weird old guy I tried to tell you about when we lived in LA……?

Chapter Two

Two cups of hot chocolate and another sandwich later, Buffy was exhausted from talking and her mother was equally exhausted from the sheer effort it took to believe what she was hearing. Gradually, as Buffy reminded her of things she had deliberately pushed to the back of her mind – things like the distorted faces of the “high on PCP” gang members that had attacked the school, as well as the face of the blond man Joyce had hit with an axe when he appeared to be threatening her daughter – the older woman resigned herself to the fact that, as incomprehensible as it may seem, Buffy was telling the truth.

While the slayer slumped in her chair, eyes shut as the lack of sleep and stress of the past two nights took their toll, Joyce studied her with growing understanding and horror.

(Oh my god. We didn’t believe her. We had her committed! All she was trying to do is to save lives and we punished her. All this time, we blamed her for being a bad daughter and she was trying to keep us safe from monsters).

Joyce allowed her own head to fall back against the couch in despair as she contemplated how unfair she had been to the battered and emotionally torn girl in front of her. Perhaps almost more painful than hearing about Buffy’s nightly battles against vampires and demons, was hearing her admit hesitantly that she had been in love with one of the creatures. One that had turned on her – Joyce was not clear how that happened, and Buffy said wearily that Giles would explain – and that had, in addition to administering most of the wounds covering her rapidly-healing body, brutally raped her. Only Buffy’s assurance that she had “staked” both Angelus and his childe, Drusilla, kept Joyce from leaving the house to find them herself and make them pay for what they had done to her child.

With a shudder, she accepted that her sixteen-year-old daughter, as much as Joyce might want to protect her, was more than capable of defending herself and had appeared to deal with the situation already. A glance at the clock told her it was pointless to think about going to bed, and she moved wearily into the kitchen to turn on the coffee pot, leaving Buffy sleeping heavily in the easy chair. She paused to put an afghan over the sleeping girl, and to run a hand lightly over her head before going into the kitchen.

When Joyce was ready to leave for work, she gently woke her sleeping daughter to suggest that she go to her bedroom and finish catching up on her sleep there. To her amazement, Buffy stretched and announced that she’d had enough sleep for now and needed to go to school – both to keep the principal off her back and to find out what Giles had done with Ethan.

“That’s his friend?” her mother asked dubiously. “The one who helped the vampires capture you?”

Buffy almost smiled. “They didn’t look all that friendly the last time I saw them,” she said wryly. “If I got what was going on, Ethan was just using me to get Giles to walk into a trap. He needed Angelus and Drusilla to help him bait the trap. He knew Giles would try to rescue me before they could kill me or…worse.”

“What could possibly be worse?” the horrified woman asked, not sure she wanted to hear the answer, but unable to stop herself.

“They could have turned me,” Buffy answered flatly. “They could have made me one of them and Giles would have had to stake me. Or try to,” she added in a whisper, wondering briefly how anyone but another slayer could be expected to stand a chance against one that had been vamped.

“Oh my god.” Joyce’s voice was pitched so low Buffy almost couldn’t hear her.

“Hey, Mom, it’s all good!” Buffy put on her perkiest cheerleader voice in an effort to wipe the devastated expression from her mother’s face. “It didn’t happen. Angelus and Drusilla are dust - so go me - and Giles was beating the stuffing out of Ethan the last time I saw them.” Her voice softened at the blatant fear on her mother’s face and the horror in her eyes. “Mom, you’ll get used to it. Not every night is like that – most of time I just go out for a couple of hours, stake a bunch of dumb fledglings, and I’m in bed by midnight.”

When Joyce’s expression didn’t change, Buffy reached up and took her hand, squeezing it gently. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way, Mom. And I’m sorry that you’re going to be worrying from now on; but in a way, it’s better, you know? I mean now I don’t have to lie about where I’m going or what I’m doing, and I don’t have hide my clothes when I can’t get the blood out, and…I’m not making this any better, am I?” she realized aloud.

Joyce shook her head dumbly, leaning down to clutch Buffy in a long hug before shaking herself and turning to go to work. She paused at the doorway and said firmly, “I want to speak to Mr. Giles as soon as possible. You tell him I said that when you find him.”

Buffy nodded silently, walking toward the stairs and waving as her mother reluctantly went out the door. She was more worried about Giles than she wanted to admit, and quickly dressed and left the house for school.

~~~~~~~~~~~

There was no sign of Giles when she got to school, and she risked having a conversation with Principal Snyder by dropping by the main office to ask if anyone had heard from the librarian.

“He is irresponsibly tardy,” came the irritated voice from the sharp-featured administrator as he walked up behind Buffy. “As will you be, Miss Summers, if you do not leave the area and get to your first period class immediately. I am sure you do not want me adding ‘consistently tardy to class’ to the rather lengthy list of infractions on your record.”

In spite of his words, the man sounded almost hopeful that Buffy would say or do something to add to his reasons for disliking her. Refusing to give him the satisfaction, Buffy gave him her most dazzling smile and thanked him for reminding her of the time. With a wave of her hand, she left the office and ran to her History class, making it in the door just as the bell began to ring.

After several hours in which she checked the library in between every class, Buffy gave up her attempts to pretend it was going to be a regular school day. Telling Willow she was going to look for Giles, she slipped out of the building and over the fence, avoiding Snyder’s suspicious eyes with practiced skill.

She carried a stake with her, laughing ruefully at herself and wondering what good she thought it would do against a sorcerer, but more than willing to find out if she got the opportunity. While her own innate goodness as well as her Slayer training told her she should not kill a human being, the essence of the Slayer inside her wanted very much to kill Ethan – preferably painfully.

As she headed for Crawford Street and it’s collection of tumbledown mansions, she wondered briefly what had happened to Spike. He’d paid no attention to her when she had left him leaning against the tree while she drove off with Willow and Xander; staring, instead, into the flickering flames that were destroying the remains of his vampire family.

For all I know, he dragged himself back into the fire and is another pile of ashes now. I need to remember to ask Giles about that again – how an evil demon can love someone so much he would die for her. Or, how an evil demon that has killed two slayers could be sympathetic and helpful to one who was at his mercy? Is it just Spike? Or can other vampires love? And if they can, why couldn’t Angelus love me the way Angel did?

As Buffy passed the burned out stone shell of the building that would forever symbolize the loss of her naivety and innocence, she couldn’t repress a shudder; nor could she resist a quick look at the tree under which she had left the grieving vampire. She continued her progress down the street, her steps becoming slower and slower, until she stopped completely and with a sigh, turned around and went back to the tree where she’d last seen Spike.

Dropping to her knees, she searched the ground carefully for any sign that he had remained outside long enough to burn up, but found no telltale ashes. She squatted beside the crushed grass for a moment, studying the trail leading back into the building. Obviously the vampire had dragged himself back into the shelter of the mansion; the question was, had he done it while it was still burning so that he could go up in flames with the love of his life, or had he waited until the fire burned itself out before retreating from the rising sun?

Grumbling at her own stupidity, she nevertheless followed the furrowed trail up to the door where she hesitated momentarily. Steeling herself to face the room in which she’d had such a life-changing experience, she entered the now mostly-roofless house and continued to follow the signs of Spike’s painful progress. She sighed with unexpected relief when the drag marks veered away from the pile of ashes in the center of the room to lead her to a large table next to the wall. The table’s marble top and position next to a stone wall seemed to have protected it from the worst of the fire and she could see immediately why Spike had crawled to it.

In spite of the early afternoon sun beating down through the partially roofless building, the table provided a sheltered and shady area into which the blond vampire had managed to drag himself before falling into an exhausted sleep. Buffy approached cautiously, but there was no sign the immobile vampire had any idea she was there. He truly looked like the corpse he was, as he lie there, curled in upon himself and clutching his body in misery or pain.

Buffy could see the dried tear tracks on his sooty cheeks and felt her own eyes well up in compassion. Oddly enough, she bore no malice toward Drusilla, having heard from Angel’s own lips how he had tormented the young seer and driven her insane before turning her. Her anger was reserved for the mage who had encouraged the vampires to torture and humiliate her, and for the one vampire who had professed to love her and had then treated her so shamefully.

Thoughts of Angelus and Ethan reminded her of her primary reason for being in the area and with a reluctant sigh, she rose to her feet and left the mansion. Smothering memories of the way Spike had taken care of her need for food and water, as well as the way he had apologetically soothed her wounds, she told herself he had only done it to help her get back at Angelus and that she owed him nothing more than the chance to live, which she had already given him. She carefully pushed the knowledge that he would be incapable of feeding himself, and therefore unlikely to heal before he became too weak to survive, into the place in her head marked, “Things I don’t want to think about.”

She worked her way up the street, pausing at each deserted building to look inside and listen for any trace of her watcher or his vengeful former friend. She wondered briefly what the gentle man she knew as her mentor could possibly have done to Ethan to cause him to want to wreak such vengeance. It seemed completely out of proportion to the beating Giles had administered earlier in the year when Ethan’s spell had turned them all into their Halloween costumes. Maybe there is more to their history than Giles has told us about, she mused as she entered yet another building.

The sound of moaning alerted her that she had probably found the right place and she proceeded cautiously as she followed the sounds. Upon entering one of the interior rooms, she found the losing sorcerer tied up, lying upon an old dining room table, his mouth taped firmly shut. She looked around for Giles, but saw no sign of her Watcher, only the frightened-looking man trussed up like a stuffed turkey. With a frisson of surprise and horror, Buffy realized that Giles had left the man there to be found by the roving gangs of vamps that occasionally tried to set up nests in the empty houses.

She cocked her head at Ethan, remembering his oily voice encouraging Angelus and Drusilla to make her scream and bleed, and the way he had traveled around her with his camera, taking care to get close ups of her wounds, as well as her bleeding private parts. His widening eyes told her he was reading her face and understanding that her presence did not in any way represent a rescue.

She was turning to leave, ignoring his high-pitched, but muffled screams when she remembered Spike lying under the table and unable to get out of the building or find food. The smile she turned on the temporarily hopeful mage when she began walking back towards him quashed his hopes before they had begun. Not bothering to try to carry him, she yanked his body off the table and began to drag him out of the house and down the street.

When Ethan realized where she was taking him, he began to struggle feebly, unsure of what awaited him, as he had not seen Drusilla’s demise and knew she would blame him for the loss of her sire. As he took in the ruined building and its missing roof, he frowned, wondering why, if Buffy was going to leave him to vampires as her watcher had done, she was bothering to bring him to a different building. Then he spotted the soot-covered, platinum-blond vampire lying under the table and renewed his struggles. He had no illusions about Spike’s attitude towards him. Angelus and Drusilla may have missed his disgusted glares as they amused themselves with the Slayer, but Ethan had not.

Nor had he missed the fury in the helpless vampire’s eyes as he had filmed him trying to climb back into the wheel chair.

Buffy dragged the man’s battered and now-bleeding body over to the table and shoved him under it so that he would be close enough for Spike to reach when he awoke. She worried her lip for a minute, wondering if she should try to awaken the vampire before she left, then relaxed when his eyelids fluttered open and he fixed his puzzled gaze on her face.

She watched his face shift as the smell of Ethan’s blood reached his nostrils and she smiled her encouragement at his questioning look.

“Bon appetit, Spike” she whispered, turning away and leaving a bit more of her childhood behind in the building. “Enjoy.”

Chapter Three

It now being much too late in the day to return to school, Buffy headed towards her watcher’s apartment and the inevitable discussion of the previous day’s events. She cringed at the idea of providing any details of her treatment at the hands of the two vampires and wondered how much Giles would guess. The second video tape that Ethan had been making with such care had melted in the heat from the fire and she couldn’t recall whether or not Angelus’ humiliating fondling of her body had occurred while the original tape was still running.

Taking a deep breath and blowing it out explosively, she entered the Watcher’s apartment to find Willow and Xander already there and she favored them with a quick smile before sitting quietly and waiting for the anticipated questioning to begin.

Giles surprised her by declaring that, while he was there for her if she chose to talk to him, he was more than willing to respect her privacy if she chose not to go into details about her time spent in the old house. As she thought about what he said, she realized that he somehow knew exactly what had happened to her and was telling her that she need not discuss it if it made her uncomfortable. <I>He must have made Ethan tell him what he did,</I> she realized with a flash of insight.

Suddenly the fact that he’d left Ethan to die at the fangs of vampires was not so shocking, and she flashed him a grateful look saying with a shrug and a blush, “You pretty much saw it on the tape- they bit me just enough to make me weak from bleeding and to hurt like hell, but not enough to kill me. Your buddy, Ethan, made very sure they knew they had to keep me alive,” she growled, her look becoming less grateful as she remembered whose old friend Ethan had been.

Giles’ eyes were cold as he replied, “For which he has paid, or will shortly,” he added, glancing out the window at the advancing twilight.

“I’m pretty sure he already has,” Buffy said quietly, but with chilling certainty.

“You found him?” There was no indication of how the older man felt about that in his voice and Buffy had a moment’s hesitation before she admitted to the man who sent her out every night to slay vampires, “I did. And I made sure he was left where he could do the most good.”

Having not seen Buffy’s impulsive rescue of the blond vampire, the watcher frowned in confusion; a condition which increased with Willow’s sudden gasp of understanding. Xander was slower to figure out what she was implying and then bellowed in outrage, “You left him for that bleached killer?”

Buffy watched as Giles’ eyes widened in sudden understanding. “You didn’t stake William the Bloody, then?” he asked quietly.

Buffy shook her head “no” and hastened to explain. “Spike was the only pers- vamp- creature in that room who wasn’t enjoying what was happening to me. He fed me, he helped my wounds stop bleeding, he gave me water—“

“And the shirt off his back,” her watcher added dryly.

“And his shirt so I wouldn’t be naked in front of everybody. Yes. He did.” Buffy’s lip came out stubbornly. “He had lost everything that mattered to him; he was starving, he’s crippled – which I did to him, and he could so hate me for – and he was still trying to make me feel better. I owe him.”

“So, you what? Fed him the bad guy? Buffy, that man was HUMAN!”

Xander’s horror and disgust was palpable.

Buffy turned to her friend wearing an expression he’d never before seen her direct towards him.

“That <I>human</I> set me up for Angelus; he made it impossible for me to fight back; he encouraged them to abuse me; he <I>filmed</I> it and sent it to Giles to make him rush into a trap. He was working on making me the star of a pornographic snuff film when Giles got there…stop me when we get to the ‘he deserves to live because he’s human’ part, Xander!’”

Her friend stared at her with his mouth open and his eyes wide. He truly had not thought about why Buffy might have been wearing nothing but Spike’s tee shirt, and they were so used to seeing her with the occasional bruise or wound that he hadn’t really thought about what she must have gone through to have been cut up the way she was when she fled the burning mansion. He made one last attempt to protest, but had only managed to say, “But, Buffy, it’s Spi-“ when she cut him off with an abrupt motion of her hand.

“Yes. It’s Spike. Spike who came here to kill my boyfriend to save his…the woman he loved. Who trashed our school and tried to kill me. I know who he is. I’ve been fighting with him for months; we’ve…we’ve fought a lot. You two don’t even know about all the times I’ve fought Spike because sometimes nobody else was around and I didn’t get hurt.”

Buffy stopped to consider what she wanted to say next. She knew that, with the exception of hiring the Order of Taraka to keep her busy when he got worried that she was going to be able to keep him from doing the ritual, the vampire had wanted to kill her himself in a fair fight. He could have brought minions with him to help, he could have done as Angelus did and had a witch or a sorcerer make her immobile so that he could kill her easily. She faced her friends and watcher and tried to explain why she bore so little animosity towards the vampire.

“Spike could have told the Order of Taraka to kidnap my mother to get to me, he could have kidnapped one of you, he could have sired a bunch of minions to just keep after me until they wore me down; he could have done a lot of things if all he’d wanted was for me to be dead. But he wanted to fight me – vampire to slayer –or he didn’t want to win. He wanted me out of his way so that he could make Drusilla better; but he didn’t want to torture me, or r…ra-“ Buffy took a deep breath.

“Except for hiring the Order when he got frustrated that Dru was going to get worse before he could get me out of the way, he never did anything except try to kill me fair and square. He has every right to hate me. I put him in that wheelchair and then I didn’t do my job. I didn’t go after Angelus as soon as I should have and that led to what happened the other night; not to mention to his ho-bag of a girl friend screwing Angelus right in front of him.”

She looked back at the three astonished people staring at her with varying degrees of surprise and dismay.

“I gave him an evil man to eat. I did. And if that makes me a bad Slayer…well, I don’t care. I haven’t had a real good last few days and that vampire was the only one who cared that I was being…and then he stopped… and he could have…but he didn’t…and he tried to help me…and he really loved…and I killed her…and….” To her own dismay, the Slayer burst into tears for the second time since she’d been rescued and sank to the floor of her Watcher’s house sobbing without let up.

Recognizing a delayed reaction when he saw one, Giles quickly ushered the curious teenagers out the door, bidding them to, “Hasten home before night falls. I do not believe Buffy will be patrolling this evening.”

After he had sent Willow and Xander home, Giles walked to a cupboard and poured a small glass half-full of his best scotch. He walked over to where Buffy was now sitting in a chair and wiping her eyes; he held the glass out to her with a “take it” gesture. She sniffed at it cautiously, wrinkling up her nose in disgust.

“Giles! I’m not old enough to drink!”

“I suspect you are not old enough for a good many of the events of the past two days, and yet, you have survived them. I feel certain you will survive this and it may help settle your nerves.”

Wearing her most dubious expression, Buffy downed the fiery liquid as if it was medicine, shuddering all over as her eyes began to water.

“Oh my god,” she gasped. “You actually drink that stuff for FUN?”

“It’s an acquired taste,” her watcher answered wryly.

Buffy set her glass down carefully and took stock of how she felt. She had to admit, now that the taste was gone from her mouth and no longer burning her throat, that the warmth spreading through her stomach was mildly pleasant and she could actually feel herself relaxing. Until she felt her muscles beginning to loosen, she had not realized how tightly she had been clenching her teeth, or how stretched taut every muscle and nerve in her body had been.

“Feel better?” Giles inquired mildly as he removed the glass and walked to the kitchen.

“A little,” she said with a smile at his back. To have said any more would have been to admit to herself how deeply she had been affected by her experiences and that was just not somewhere she wanted to go.

“Thank you,” she offered softly.

“You’re welcome,” he answered, sitting down across from her. They rested quietly for a few minutes until he interrupted her pleasant buzz to ask, “What are your plans for William the Bloody, once he is able to get about again?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted quietly. “I’m hoping he will just leave. Go back to wherever they came from and stay away from Sunnydale.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I’ll worry about that when it happens,” she replied with a sigh in her voice. “Right now I don’t even know if he’ll live. He can’t hunt yet, so unless I bring him—“

“You are not planning to continue to feed him?” Giles’ voice took on more of an edge as he followed her train of thought. “Buffy, it is one thing to use his obvious need for sustenance as a means of disposing of an enemy; it is quite something else to assist him in becoming dangerous again.”

“If I think he’s dangerous, I’ll stake him,” she said, her lower lip coming out slightly to hint at the emerging stubbornness he could hear in her voice.

“If I think he is becoming dangerous, <I>I</I> will stake him,” her watcher responded, reminding her of who was theoretically in charge in their relationship.

“No!” she replied forcefully. “If he has to be staked, I’ll do it. He…he would want me to,” she added softly. “He has that right. To be killed by a Slayer.”

Shaking his head at the twisted sense of honor that his slayer seemed to share with one of the most notorious vampires of modern times, the older man tacitly agreed to her conditions and changed the subject. When, after some desultory conversation about school and the unlikelihood of Synder’s overlooking her absences, Buffy rose to leave, he did not argue with her but just suggested gently that she go directly home and have dinner with her mother.

Buffy nodded her compliance, but when she left his apartment complex she turned her feet towards the nearest butcher shop and spent what little money she had on several containers of pig’s blood. Holding the bag of cold blood, she resolutely set out for Crawford Street and the burned house in which she’d left two enemies – one an evil human and one a strangely honor-bound vampire.

She entered the building quietly, peering through the dimness and wishing the street lamps outside were closer and brighter. It occurred to her that after dark was not, perhaps, the best time to be visiting a vampire; even one who was unable to chase her if she should feel the need to run. Her slayer senses were on full alert as she walked carefully into the room in which she had last seen Spike. She fumbled around wishing she had thought to bring a flashlight until she heard Spike’s unmistakable accent.

  &nb