The Turing Test, by dutchbuffy2305
Rating: NC-17
Thumbnail: Sex with Robots is More Common than Most People Think
Timeline: Post NFA
Big hug to my beta mommanerd!
Author's website: http://home.planet.nl/~dutchbuffy2305;
Feedback: Yes, please, loads of it, to dutchbuffy2305@yahoo.co.uk
Part 1
“Willow, do you think you could make me a Spikebot?”
Willow swallowed her triple espresso before she was ready and had to be assisted and patted down for a longer time than Buffy really had patience for. It wasn’t always about Willow; this was about Buffy and her needs. Major needs.
"Are you kidding?"
"Nope," Buffy said. "Serious as a British middle aged watcher."
"But Buffy, why Spike? Spike's been dead for, what, two years? Even supposing you've been harboring deep Spike-missage, which by the way you did not share with me, what good would a Spikebot be? It wouldn't be the real thing."
"I miss him," Buffy said simply.
"Okay, if you say so, of course you do." Willow nodded several times. "So even if you dated the Immortal for more than a year, you still really missed Spike?"
"Yeah. And don't look so skeptical. Sometimes it takes a girl a little time to know what's wrong. I knew I missed something, I just didn't know what."
"And you decided it was him you missed. I don’t know, Buffy, if you miss Spike, why do you think a Spikebot will do the trick? If it's a physical thing, I have this nifty whatsamagoogly called the Rabbit Pearl, and it really does a wonderful job of making you forget your girlfriend with the pierced tongue…I mean, Buffybot’s tongue control must have been remarkable to be able to make her talk like that, but I still think that the Dolphin or the…”
Buffy had to be firm and stop her before she got to the Aphid or the Zebra.
“Willow. Stop. Rewind. I don’t want a Spike dildo. I‘ve tried Spike-sized vibrators. It’s not the same without a Spike attached to it. You know?”
Willow nodded doubtfully and threw a longing look at the remains of her espresso. Clearly she wanted take a fortifying sip, but was afraid to in case Buffy was going to say another shocking thing. Buffy didn’t think it was that shocking. If a girl finally realized what was missing in her life, she should simply go for it. She just hadn’t acknowledged before who she needed. Or maybe a robot was a what. Whatever.
“Willow, I want the Spikebot to talk to me like Spike did. You’d have to make a Spikebot with a soul, you do get that? We could hold hands, and he could read poetry to me, and we could save the world together. And could you make a thing, that, you know, if we held hands a certain way they would burst into flame? Painless, non-burny flame?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You‘re serious? Why a robot? What’s wrong with Italian boyfriends? What’s wrong with the Immortal, for that matter?” Willow asked.
Willow was stalling, Buffy suspected. She knew Willow could do it. She'd patched the Buffybot up so many times.
“I’ve wondered about that,” Buffy said. “I think the Immortal might actually be a robot himself. It’s not natural, the way he's so perfect and even-tempered and has shiny hair like that. He’s so symmetrical. Have you sever seen a symmetric human being before? Or was it that serial killers were more symmetrical or more asymmetrical than non-murdery people? Look, I took a photo of him, then I cut it in two and copied the halves and pasted them back together. See? He's completely symmetric. That's not natural. That's not what I want from the Spikebot. No perfection. Just Spike imperfections, like swearing a lot and doing that thing with his tongue.”
Willow’s eyes had grown very large. Buffy stopped.
After a little pause, Willow said, "Imperfect, asymmetrical Spike. Tongue. Check."
Buffy could sort of see Willow changing gear. This had just been the clanking and shrieking of un-oiled parts of her engine, and now it was starting to run more smoothly.
"Okay," Willow said, here eyes faraway into her own version of research mode. "Does it have to be a mechanical thing? Could it be a magical simulacrum, maybe?"
"Sure, whatever works," Buffy said with a shrug. "Or, you could, you know, raise him from the dead?"
"Buffy!"
"Okay, okay, I just threw that in there in case it was doable. No biggie if it can't be done."
"Even if it was possible,” Willow said with conspicuous virtue, “consider the ethics of it. Would Spike want to be raised from the dead? He died saving the world, remember? Maybe he's happily plonking a harp somewhere."
"Willow, you know Spike returned from that? He was with Angel when there was an almost apocalypse and everybody from the LA people died."
"Yeah, sure, I knew that,” Willow said defensively. "Slipped my mind. I was in Tibet, remember? They weren’t big on the outside news in the retreat."
"Humph," Buffy said.
"And, um, no Angelbot, I guess?"
"I'm over Angel," Buffy said. "Besides, he was dating a werewolf, I heard from Andrew."
Willow's eyes met hers in total understanding. "Skanky werewolf girlfriend. I'm so with you on this."
For some reason Buffy couldn’t quite fathom, this shared humiliation got Willow over the fence and she grabbed in her bag for a notebook. Buffy settled back in her chair happily and with a distinct fluttery feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Willow's hand, which had been descending into her handbag, withdrew and she got that thoughtful look back again.
"Buffy, you were pretty grossed out when Spike made a Buffybot, and when Warren made the Aprilbot. How come you want a Spikebot? What would the real Spike think of that? For that matter what would your friends think? I think it's kind of dodgy, ethically. Kind of weird."
"Hey! You're supposed to be my friend. I'm lonely. I want Spike back. I can’t have him, so I'm settling for the next best thing."
Willow shook her head. "Buffy, I think I'd prefer you dating another vampire or demon to doing this. I think it’s just plain wrong."
Buffy pouted. "I thought my best friend would understand me. I'm tired, Will. Tired of trying to be normal and finding a normal boyfriend. You think I haven’t tried? I bruise them, Will. Or if I try to tell them they dump me because they think I’m insane or criminal or whatever. I don’t fit in a normal life."
"Hey. Preaching to the choir. I have girlfriends, though. Plenty of other witches in the sea. What about the other slayers? You have tons in common with them, don’t you?"
"They're girls, Will. I’m not flexible on sex with girls. And I have tried other vampires, but it's kind of gross, you know, grave dirt, blood between their teeth…But it’s not the physical thing. It’s the whole Spike thing. The package."
"Buffy, at best you're gonna get a robot who resembles Spike a little bit. It’s not gonna be the real thing. Are you sure you could settle for that? You’re young. There'll be another guy for you."
Buffy crossed her arms and tried to show Willow her Buffy version of the resolve face, but Willow had already reached for the notebook again and was selecting pens in the appropriate colors.

In spite of a huge lump of misgivings in her throat, Willow was grabbing for a fresh notebook, a purple one, and was making notes. “Smoke? You want him to smoke?”
Buffy tapped her tube of lip-gloss against her teeth. “Hmm. Good one. I guess not. I mean, I do see that I’d want him as lifelike as possible, with annoying imperfections to make him not so annoyingly perfect, but smoking is carrying realism too far. Scratch that.”
Willow methodically worked her way through a preliminary list of specifications. Height, length, circumference, list (to the left, Buffy said. Made her scream).
“Do you have a picture, Buffy?” she said, rapidly writing down things she could remember Spike saying.
Buffy lifted her chin and signaled for another macchiato, but Willow could see her blinking. “Nope. We never...I never got around to that. Maybe Giles has some in his Watcher files.”
“What's left of them,” Willow said somberly. “Maybe the Internet. And I’ll ask around. You never know who kept what.”
Willow wasn’t saying, but she was mentally making a list of people to see. Xander, who’d lived with Spike. Giles, for watcherly knowledge. They'd have to be gently misled a littel bit or they would never consent to join in this dinky venture. Andrew. Andrew could be talked into it, she was sure. Would Dawn cooperate? Maybe.

“Willow! Long time no-”
Andrew’s happy gurgle was cut off when Willow grabbed his arm and dragged him into his workroom.
“Andrew. We need to talk.”
“I didn’t do it, I swear it wasn’t me, it just happened, I’m never that...”
“Shut up, Andrew. Do you, or don’t you, have pictures or footage of Spike?”
Andrew blushed a bright red. “No. I don’t. Buffy broke my camcorder, and I never had a chance to take anything away from Sunnydale.”
“So you have nothing of Spike’s?”
“No. Really! Honestly! Willow!!”
Willow stared harder until he gave in and pointed her to a closet. Willow opened the doors and looked straight into the smirk of a bodiless Spike.
“Whoa. Very realistic, Andrew. I thought Warren was bot boy?”
“Yeah, well, Warren may have thought he was the man, but you don’t seriously think he could have done all of that on his own? Jonathan and I did a lot of the work on locomotion and databases, you know. I compiled the one on you.”
“Huh.”
Willow thought hard. An idea was forming in her brain. Subcontracting Andrew would make her work so much easier.
“So you could just finish this one, make a Spikebot as good as the Buffybot?”
“Sure, I could, I mean, that would be easy, we ruled the world technology-wi-”
Andrew cringed as Willow reached for his ear again. “Not my ear! I have delicate ears. They're sensitive, like a Ferengi.”
“Yeah,” Willow said skeptically. "I’m not sexually stimulating you or anything right now, am I?”
Andrew shifted and squirmed and tried to escape from her iron gaze, but it was hopeless. He quailed before her resolve-face.
“I don't know if it could be as good. I mean, Spike had a box of specs, and pictures, and videotapes, and instructions…and, and some porn videos too.”
“No porn,” Willow said firmly. “That's not what Buff wants him for. She just wants a souled Spikebot so she can talk to him and cuddle him at night and save the world together.”
There was something deeply icky about Andrew programming the Spikebot for his more delicate functions, the functions she had no doubt about being used most of all. She'd do that. Could probably teach Spike a thing or two about girls. Kennedy had been a wizard with her tongue.
“Oh,” Andrew said. “Okay. I can do that. Two weeks?”

Willow's heart went bumpity bump as she ran up the stairs to Andrew's tiny Roman apartment, as if she'd downed her weekly ration of caffeine in one fell swallow. He’d invited her for a beta testing already. It was incredible how fast he worked. Okay, it had taken three weeks instead of two, but that was still nothing short of miraculous.
She pressed the bell and Andrew's cheery little dingdong sounded.
"Willow! Come in! You'll be so surprised. May I introduce you to Spike mark II?"
Someone who looked like Spike, but who was wearing a flowered T-shirt and tight white jeans, bounded up to Willow and hugged her tightly.
"Willow, baby! You look bloody beautiful!"
Spikebot flapped his hand and raked his eyes over her clothes. "Love the boots. And your hair color is bloody amazing."
Willow slid her eyes around to Andrew. "WTF?" she mimed.
Andrew shrugged. "He needs a little bit of work in the dialogue function, I guess."
Willow shivered. "Syeah. Not to mention the wardrobe function. What were you thinking?"
"Hey, calm down. I’ve seen how you can get. You know how much work it was to get this far?"
Spikebot twirled a curly lock around his finger and wiggled his hips.
'"Ew! Turn it off!" Willow said.
She hadn’t been that fond of Spike, what with the broken bottle memories and all, but this was wrong on a deep, personal level. It was like dishonoring Spike’s memory or something. She didn’t get why Andrew couldn’t see that. He’d been so fond of Spike, maybe even worshipped him. In an icky, nerdy kind of way.
A new suspicion dawned. Just what had Andrew been up two with the Spikebot? Buffy wouldn't be happy if she had the idea it might be pre-used, however gently.
"Spikebot," Andrew said, "go watch Coronation Street. Continue from where you left off."
"Yes, master," Spikebot said meekly and shuffled over to the couch.
For a second, when he threw himself down in a grouchy heap, he seemed just like the real Spike, but then he caught her look and smiled widely at her, and that was something she'd never ever seen before. An expression on Spike’s face that was not a smirk or a sneer or impassive cool. Very unsettling.
"Master?" Willow said. "That's just creepy, Andrew. You’re not doing anything funny with it, are you?"
"Of course not. Spike was my friend. What do you think I would do to him? I wouldn’t want to besmirch his memory."
Besmirch. That was nice; it had a kind of word-of-the-day ring to it.
Andrew lowered his voice. "Come on. I've set up the test in the other room. Don’t worry about the bot. It just has that one response and a voiceware self-learning program installed. Here. You just write down phrases and things you remember Spike saying, and the voice generation software will try out several versions, and you tell it which one you like best. Got that? Run it by you again?"
Well, who did the little twerp think he was talking to? Willow Rosenberg, software queen of Sunnydale high, for example? Willow sniffed and settled herself before the nice big flatscreen setup Andrew had and dug in.
Phrases. After a minute of furious thinking, she conceded that it was kind of hard.
"Bloody hell," she typed.
She'd have to do better than that.
"Bloody 'ell," the artificial voice intoned. Very wrong, this one.
She checked the box that asked if it was too low, too high; too fast, too slow, etcetera. This was going to be a long session, she could tell.
Several hours later, hundreds of boxes checked and only a "Yeah, right" and a "Fuck off, Harris” added to the repertoire, Willow was ready to concede defeat.
"Come back tomorrow, Willow?" Andrew piped chirpily, watching some grainy black and white footage of what she recognized after looking closely as Drusilla and Spike in funny clothes killing grainy black and white people. It was only a minute or so and then looped right back. The bot was watching too, frozen in an attentive un-Spike like stance.
She didn’t want to come back. This was so much hard work. She needed one of those chilled blue eye masks and a brisk walk, but possibly not in that order, since the eye-patch would make walking a bit of a hazard, not to mention attract public notice, and then she'd think up a way to magic herself out of all this sloggage.
"Yeah, okay," she replied ungraciously and took off.

When she entered the apartment, two weeks later, she got a gruff nod from the black-dressed Spike bot.
"Red," he said and slouched past her to the kitchen, throwing himself forward in a good approximation of the shoulders-first, hips-later walk the real Spike used to have.
Willow had to admit that Andrew was doing a great job. The voice intonation and the walk were vintage Spike.
She was actually more impressed, she guessed, than she would have been if this were the first she'd seen of Spikebot. Now she knew how many endless hours of typing in phrases and preferences she’d put in, how many questioning sessions with an irritable Buffy, who didn’t like to be reminded of how little she really knew of Spike. She didn’t get much farther than his brand of cigarettes and the size of his T-shirt, and beyond that, she couldn’t articulate. Buffy had barely been able to bring herself to point at pictures on the Internet, and there had been diagrams and Latin words that had made them both blush. Willow's knowledge of boy on girl sex had been significantly expanded.
Willow now knew more about William the Bloody and his former vampire family than she’d ever wanted to know. Maybe she ought to look into using a forgetting spell on herself. There wouldn't be dicy ethics in self-medication, would there? She sighed and decided to put it before her Witches Anonymous group.
"Whaddya think?" Andrew said. "Two hundred percent improvement on the first model?"
"Absolutely," Willow said and stared as Spikebot shouldered roughly past her, smoking a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of Scotch almost simultaneously.
"Bloody hell," Spikebot growled. "Sodding couch. Can't you fucking get out of my fucking way, Rosenberg?"
"We need to fine-tune the swearing. And he's kinda grumpy," Willow said. "How come?"
"That's his default mood setting. Let me demonstrate the other settings on the menu."
"Spikebot, go to 'Drunken and Amorous.'"
Spike lurched up from the couch again, hiccupped, and slouched over to Willow, penetrating her personal space in a very heterosexual way.
"How about it, pet?" he leered, wiggled his tongue and waggled his hips.
Willow jumped back a couple of feet and squeaked, "Cut it out, Spike!"
Spikebot froze halfway a lewd expression.
"See?" Andrew caroled. "I've set him to recognize and obey your voice as well as mine. Coz you're near Buffy more often."
"I said Spike. Does it think it's Spike?" Willow said.
"Sure. Shouldn't he?"
"I don't know. Wouldn't it hurt him, if he thought he was really Spike and Buffy turned him off at night?"
"You mean in the morning when she goes to work?"
Andrew sniggered offensively and Willow threatened to box his ears.
"Don't joke about that. I told you I'd program the nighttime activities, except for patrolling."
Willow walked around the frozen Spikebot. She poked and prodded it in some strategic places and allowed that Andrew had used superior materials in building the body. She peered at the curly neck hair and even at close range the texture of the skin and hair was almost realistic.
"Andrew, is he as tall as the real Spike? He seems shorter."
Andrew shrugged. "As near as I could make out, yeah."
"Okay. And how long does he run? I mean, how often do I have to juice him up?"
Andrew's face brightened and he bounded away into the kitchen. Willow waited patiently. Andrew came back with something that looked very much like a blood bag.
"Look, Willow! I changed the batteries that the Buffy bot had to an organic transformer. This is so much more realistic. It will look just like a real vampire drinking blood. And watch the face. This is a masterpiece."
Willow looked on as the Spikebot grabbed the bag, shifted into game face, tore it open and glugged it down with brilliantly simulated predatorial relish. It was amazingly real.
"Andrew, I take everything back. You're a genius. Buffy will love this."
Andrew beamed and patted the Spikebot's black leather back. The bot scowled realistically but didn't protest.
"So, can I start programming the you-know-whats?"
Andrew nodded. "Same as the other algorithms. We tell him to respond to certain cues in Buffy's breathing, temperature and, erm, gland-production."
"We should give her a safe word, don't you think? In case he goes too far."
"I think we don't need it,” Andrew said. "I programmed in a behavioral monitor. I call it the Superego Organization Ultimate Law."
Willow rolled her eyes. "Oh, Andrew. An acronym. So sixties TV. Next you’ll be writing fanfic. What fandom?"
Andrew tossed his head and met her eyes defiantly. "None of your business."
Willow raised her eyebrows but nodded. Fair enough.
Her cell rang. Buffy. She hesitated but decided to answer it.
"Willow? You're over at Andrew's, aren’t you? I wanna come over and have a look at the Spikebot."
"But…"
"I don't care if he’s not ready, Will. I'm just so curious! And excited. Be there in five!"
And Buffy hung up.
"What?” Andrew said.
"Buffy's coming over. We have to hide the bot. It's not ready."
Andrew glanced at Bot, who stood impassively waiting for orders.
"Spikebot, initiate full character mode. Reduce swear words by 30%. He's ready enough, Willow. He's equipped with learning algorithms, so Buffy can correct things he does wrong, and he’ll repeat things that get her approval, and so strengthen the learning process."
"But Buffy will expect him to perform! I haven’t programmed in the sex thing!"
Andrew shrugged. "He’s got the physical algorithms. He can learn."
"Not to worry, Willow. I’ll be fine. Expect Buffy might enjoy fine-tuning me," Spike, no, the Spikebot said, curling his tongue and lighting a cigarette with the exact gestures she now remembered Spike using. She gaped. God, Andrew was good. Her mind did a hop skip jump ahead, into a sizzling white notion of utter perfection.
"Andrew, I’m impressed. Very, very impressed. Can we talk about making another Bot?"
Andrew grinned. "You want a Kennedybot? No way. This was so much work already. Giles has been complaining about my reports."
Willow's eyes stared at long ago images. "Not a Kennedybot, Andrew. I was thinking of someone else. Someone dead."
"Well," Andrew started. The bell rang. "That’ll be Buffy. I'll get it."
Willow looked up and met the blue eyes of the Spikebot. Huh. She'd never noticed that Spike’s eyes had been blue. He gazed at her steadily, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that his algorithms were divining her innermost thoughts. Andrew must have put some uber creepy stuff in there.

Buffy ran up the stairs to Andrew's apartment. There was a spring in her step and a song in her heart. Spike. She'd see Spike. Never mind that it wasn’t the real one. She'd have to make do and she would. They'd patrol together, and she could sleep with him curled up against her back, making her feel safe and loved and cherished. The Immortal had made her feel sexy and pretty and young, but nice as that had been, she wanted the other. The essential Spike thing. Her imagination would make up where the robot lacked finesse, she just knew that.
She hesitated when she reached the landing. Now that she was a minute from seeing him, she felt different. Shy, maybe. Which was pretty damn silly, considering it was array of chips and software and god knows what they made his body of. Barbie hair. She envisaged Andrew buying platinum blonde C-brand Barbies and cutting their hair of in the appropriate length for Spike hair. She shivered. That was a weird thought. And pointless besides. She regrouped, tossing her own long shiny hair, and pressed the bell with a firm Slayer finger.
Andrew opened the door with a big smile. His smiles always looked fake to her, as if he still played a role he hadn’t quite mastered.
"Buffy! Come in! We have the Spikebot ready for your inspection!"
Buffy's hands shook when she hung up her light spring coat. Her heart thumped like a rabbit’s foot in a Disney movie and her throat was dry.
She entered the living room and there he was, lounging bonelessly against a wall, his head wreathed in cigarette smoke. Buffy took a mighty leap and was burying her face in his neck before she’d consciously decided to. It even smelled like Spike, black leather and smoky flesh, dark chocolate and heather all blending into a perfectly aged Spike-malt.
"Spike," she sobbed, knowing she was acting like a crazy person and unable to stop.
"Engage empathy menu, priority one," Andrew said close behind her.
The bots hands circled comfortingly on her back.
"I'm on it, Andrew," Spike’s voice said.
It reverberated through her whole body. It sounded exactly like Spike’s voice, a bit choked up even.
She looked up and saw his eyes, so blue, suspiciously shiny and blinking fast. Andrew had even given him real eyelashes.
Willow blew her nose loudly, and Buffy whished she had a tissue to do the same.
Spike reached in his pocket and held one out. She blew. He was perfect.
"Andrew, you're the greatest," Willow sniffled and blew again. “This was beautiful. Is this the real Buffy, by the way, or is it a Buffybot you made to surprise me?"
Hey! Buffy turned her head away from Spike's wonderfully firm and springy chest to throw Willow a dark look.
Willow dabbed her eyes and flapped her hands. "Sorry Buffy. Just never saw you act like this before."
That was true enough. She hadn’t known she could act like that herself, either. Letting go like that, owning up to her feelings for Spike? Maybe it was easier because she knew it was just a bot and wouldn’t, couldn’t judge her.
Andrew's voice intruded annoyingly into her dreamy haze.
"Buffy, you have to realize that Spikebot isn’t completely finished. He needs fine-tuning on behavior and speech, but a lot of that he will get from your reactions. Don’t hesitate to correct him. He’ll learn from it and do better next time."
Buffy gazed up into Spikebot’s creamy-skinned, sculpted face. She'd kinda like to kiss those lips right now, but she’d given Andrew enough of a show. She was going to take the bot out on patrol, that would give them some privacy and she could test his fighting prowess.
"Buffy, do you understand? We’ve also not gotten around to programming his sex function. Sorry about that," Willow said. "You could leave him here for another two weeks, or you could teach him yourself."
Buffy's thighs trembled and she wrapped herself more tightly around his hips.
"That would be…that would be fine," she said.
Her voice sounded breathless and over eager, but Spikebot’s face was smooth and bland. She suppressed a tiny pang of something. Disappointment or shame, she didn’t know. On the other hand, the stuff she could teach him…blow his little botty mind. Her cheeks were blazing and she had only one thought, to get out of here now.
She grabbed Spikebot’s hand. "We're going patrolling, now. Thanks Will, thanks Andrew. You guys really came through for me."
She had to suppress another sob. Had she ever been as squishy and gooey as this, even before shoveling seven years of Slayer shit? If she didn’t kill something soon there was gonna be puddle of Buffy right there on the floor.
"Let's go kill something, Spikebot. I know you wanna!"
He grinned back at her and flung on his black duster in a great flourish like dragons wings. "What are you waiting for, Slayer? Got demons to kill, nasties to slay. Night’s not getting any younger."
It was barely dusk, but she forgave him for that. He was only a robot.
They bounded down the stairs three steps at a time. Buffy’s heart threatened to fly out of her throat with happiness. The Spikebot grinned fiercely and bounded along, matching her pace easily; except that he was soundless, just like a real vamp, as opposed to her clicketing heels. Buffy decided that from now on those were her lucky boots.

Buffy took the Spikebot to the Coliseum, being the prettiest, most romantic and moonlit spot she could think of, and a hotbed of vamp activity besides, what with all the clueless tourist girls.
She halted and the Spikebot ghosted to a stop beside her as if on cue. Buffy cooled her heated cheeks against a bit of crumbling marble for a few seconds. Nothing could happen to her tonight. He was here, as much of him as she could possibly expect, and he hadn’t put a foot wrong so far.
Spikebot put two cautious fingertips on her bare arm and she nearly shrieked but settled for swooning. Goosebumps tumbled over her skin in a giddy dance, crashing and meeting at the crown of her head and her nipples, making the night twice as sultry and romantic as before.
Buffy turned and laid herself full length against the bot's body, fitting her as perfectly as the real Spike.
“I love you so much," she blurted out.
Oh God, she’d said it! She hadn’t even planned it, like when Spike was still alive; when it had taken her months to gather enough courage to get past her own stony silent habits. No need for self-denial in front of a robot.
The Spikebot crushed her close and unexpectedly bit her earlobe.
Buffy groaned loudly. Her knees buckled and she held on tighter to the bot’s hard shoulders.
"I am not programmed to reciprocate those feelings," he said softly in her ear.
Buffy swayed deliriously in his arms. "It’s okay," she said, mindlessly patting his back and touching his hair. "I know you aren't him. I just wanted to say it. Maybe you can learn to say something back to that, can’t you?"
"I am programmed to learn from you," he said, and she didn't care what he said as long as he kept talking.
That voice. Clever, clever Andrew. Unadulterated Spike, love and sex and grainy death making her feel like a girl instead of a grim warrior. A silly girl, who could love like she once had because there was no one real here. She could practice on the bot and it would never refuse her or harm her, and maybe she could even learn to do it for real again.
"I know it’s silly, but I’m so happy to have you. And you don’t have to obey me, okay? Do whatever you want. Do you have free will?"
The Spikebot kissed her upturned lips before he answered that. "I have some leeway in my programming, which I can fill in with random alternatives. Is that what you mean?"
Buffy sighed and kneaded his biceps. Good stuff, that. "Something like that. Never mind. Don’t break your pretty head about it. I'll teach you."
She leaned against him, musing deeply, taking her time about it. No hurry now. No impending apocalypses. She might wish she still was an apocalypse, singular girl, but with the Spikebot at her side, she wouldn't even mind.
Their silent communing, or perhaps it was just Buffy communing and the bot listening to muzak while he was on hold, was roughly interrupted by a shrieking teakettle clomping past, followed in an easy lope by a couple of Roman vamps. Buffy knew they were Roman because they were putting back little combs in their back pockets. The local undead had a penchant for shiny shoes and not a hair out of place, so they tended to prefer only mild exertion when pursuing their prey. They seldom needed to, because there were always slowfooted tourists who went out at night for the sole purpose of being charmed by Italian males.
“You there! Move along, pronto! This is my territory,” on of them snapped to Spike in passing. Hey, the Roman vamps thought he was real.
“After you, Slayer,” Spikebot said courteously and Buffy sprang off in hot pursuit.
She dusted Undead Loverboy One and Spike took Two, after a nod from her. So Andrew had provided a stake in the Spikebot’s duster. Very thoughtful.
“Pity that hunting here is always over so quickly,” Buffy said regretfully. “These guys have no stamina.”
“Always been like that,” Spikebot said. “We never stayed long here. But the food’s good. It’s the olive oil in their blood, very easy on the digestive system.”
Buffy resolved to ask Andrew to dinner. He’d even provided the Bot with back-story, so cute. She held out her hand to him and he immediately took it. His big cool hand enfolded hers comfortingly and they strolled away into the night, stakes at the ready. As ever, denial was a girl’s best friend.
Buffy knew a great trick she wanted to show the bot. She often staked vamps puttering by on their scooters, occasionally two at a time, Roman vamps being quite slender and no match for her solid, XXL American stakes.
Spikebot bought her a granita and life had never been better.
Part 2
Willow peeled the pillow off her ear and reached fuzzily for the alarm. She banged at it but it didn’t stop. She opened one eye and saw the display of her cell phone winking at her. What idiot was calling her at this hour of the night?
"Willow!" the phone screeched in her ear. "Spike’s back! Spike’s alive! I saw him, in Buffy's bed!"
"It’s just a robot, Dawn," Willow grumbled. "No need to get all over the moon about at three A.M. Sheesh."
"A robot?"
The voice fell silent. Willow could hear agitated breathing at the other end.
"I can't believe…Are you sure? He opened his eyes and put his fingers to his lips. He didn’t want me to wake Buffy! Can a robot do that?"
"Sure," Willow said. "Andrew and I made it. We're way past what the Buffybot could do, you know. Way."
"Yeah, right," Dawn said.
Willow could hear the skepticism drip down into the cell phone. It made her kind of miffed. Didn't Dawn know she was an awesome witch and computer nerd? Dawn had no reason to doubt her.
"Go back to bed, Dawnie. Buffy asked me to make a Spikebot, and I did. He isn’t completely finished yet, so if you note any off notes in his behavior, please tell me about it. But not now. Now I'm going back to sleep. G’nite Dawnie. Sleep tight."

Dawn opened her eyes a minute before the alarm was going to go off and shut it down before it would wake Buffy and Spike. Spikebot. The silliest name ever. They could have given him a real name, right? They'd be calling him Spike in no time and then the confusion would be complete. She was tiptoeing to the shower when a hand fell on her shoulder.
"Nibblet," Spike said.
Spikebot, Spikebot! He's not real. Willow says.
"You're programming is so obsolete,” she said huffily. "Spike hasn’t called me that in years."
She wasn’t going to look at him. What was Buffy thinking when she commissioned this? It was exactly like when she almost zombiefied Mom, or when Willow was making Tara forget. She wasn’t going to be part of this. At all.
"I know," Spikebot said quietly.
Now he sounded like Spike with the soul. Those weren’t happy memories. She didn’t want to have them. She'd never made up with him and she felt so mean thinking back on it.
"Maybe the real Spike wished he was still allowed to call you that," the bot continued in that maddening voice.
With a flash of insight like a blow in the midriff, Dawn knew for sure. And then she got really mad. She was so not going to be a part of this silly façade. She stalked into the kitchen and started making herself breakfast. If she chewed real loud she wouldn’t be able to hear that reasonable voice going on.
She shook cereal into a bowl, which was easy because her hands shook so much. Half of it spilled over on the kitchen table and floor. Never mind. Buffy could clean it up. Serve her right with her ridiculous, just wrong notions of what she could get away with.
Dawn still wasn’t looking at Spike, but she knew he’d followed her. Small noises and a penetrating smell of lighter fluid and fresh smoke told her what he was doing.
"I’m glad you have so much concern for my health," she said. "Aren’t you violating the First Law of robotics or something?"
"Why are you so mad, Dawn? Buffy needs this to make her happy."
"Are you crazy?" Dawn said, and to her humiliation felt tears spurting out of her eyes. “I was happy for you. Andrew told me you were in LA, fighting with Angel and his crew. I was happy that you had a place for yourself, in your own right, not in Buffy’s shadow. And now you're here? Doing this? You're such an idiot.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Spike sat down across from her. He raked his hand through his hair, making it stand up in little cotton wool tufts.
"You're talking to me as if I were real. Don’t forget I'm a robot. A robot who's made to simulate a bloke whose strength wasn’t in his brain either.”
"Oh go fuck yourself," Dawn muttered. "I'm not Buffy, never seeing anything that she doesn’t want to I'm not that easily fooled. You think I’m blind? You’re the real Spike, what else."
"I’m bloody well not! If you wish, Andrew could open me up and give you proof."
Dawn stared hard at him. She'd been so sure. She still was. He was just trying to maintain the illusion for Buffy’s sake.
"If Buffy’s so happy to see you, why are you doing this? She'd be as happy to see the real you."
Spike sighed. "I’m not programmed to understand concepts like this. Ask me other questions."
"I will," Dawn said tightly.
She shoveled in a big spoon of cereal because if she didn’t mash down on something hard, she'd have to cry again and she was too adult for that. The cereal, once swallowed, wouldn’t continue down smoothly and settled prickly and stubbornly behind her breastbone. Stupid stuff.
"I thought you were dust. You and Angel and whatsername girl?"
"According to Andrew, Angel is dust," the Spikebot, or Spike, she still hadn’t decided, said. His face was bland, giving nothing away. "Dunno about Illyria."
Dawn got up to pour herself some orange juice to take care of the lump in her throat. Then something occurred to her.
"I'm gonna check with Andrew if he knows that name, don’t think I won't."
Spike steepled his fingers together.
"Dawn. Don’t make it so hard on yourself. I'm not Spike. I’m something that looks like him. To make Buffy happy."
"Buffy should make herself happy," Dawn said. "Everyone knows it’s a weakness if you have to depend on another person. That's why I was so happy you were off being a hero on your own accord."
"The real Spike, you mean," Spikebot said.
“I’ve had it with your bullshit," Dawn said. "Take off your shirt."
"What?"
"Take off your shirt," she said impatiently. "Buffybot had a panel in her belly. If you’re a bot, I can open yours."
Spikebot sighed and drew up his black T-shirt. Dawn gulped. She’d forgotten that last time she’d really talked to Spike she’d been a child, knowing only the superficial stuff about sex and boys, not what it really felt like to be touched by one. The sight of his creamy belly, all ridged and taut with muscle, gave her a funny feeling somewhere. She so didn’t want to go there with Spike. Not to be outfaced, she poked hard on his belly button, eliciting an oof, but there was no layer of skin peeling off like the Buffybot had. Humph.
Spike smirked at her.
"Very funny," she said darkly. "So, you just proved to me you are the real Spike?”
"No, I just proved to you technology has progressed. Call Andrew and ask him if you can sit in on maintenance."
"Don’t think I won't."
She crossed her arms, noticing that he automatically mirrored her arm movements, and stared hard at him. He smiled back faintly, lifting his scarred eyebrow, just like the real Spike. She couldn’t believe Andrew could make a bot that good.
"Spike! Spike?"
Buffy sounded needy and maybe a little panicked, and Spike was out of the kitchen before Dawn could suggest he should go back to her. She'd better go take possession of the bathroom in case the amorous couple decided to take a shower together. Not that they ever had, as far as she knew. And probably Spikebot wouldn’t want to get water in his cogs. If he had cogs, that is. Spikebot. So not like Buffybot. But maybe that didn’t prove a thing. Maybe it just proved that Willow and Andrew knew Spike a whole lot better than Spike had known Buffy back then.

Buffy snuggled deeper under the covers, luxuriously waiting for Spikebot to return. He’d held her all night, exactly as she had requested and it had been perfect. No need to worry about him getting numb arms or anything, because robots just didn't. She'd had the most perfect night ever, just being held, feeling safe and loved; pillowing her head on Spikebot's seriously padded biceps.
Spikebot returned, quickly shimmied out of his T-shirt and climbed back into bed with her. Buffy stretched thoroughly, one limb at a time. She sighed and wedged herself tightly against his groin. Oops. Robots could get hard-ons. Major ones. A good thing she’d written down Spike’s measurements for Willow after all.
“I thought you weren’t programmed for sex,” she said idly and kissed his arm. His other arm snaked around her waist and clasped her more tightly than before.
“I am programmed with standard biological functions and watched Animal Planet as part of my education,” Spikebot said huskily and inched closer. “I haven’t tested those functions yet.”
“So, I’m your first?” Buffy said and giggled. “Big relief that you and Andrew didn’t fool around on me.”
Spikebot growled and bit the skin of her nape.
“Why did you do that?” Buffy asked and pushed back at him for more. What the hell was he waiting for? Permission, she guessed.
The bot hesitated. “I don’t know. I felt I had no alternative but this. If you wish, I can display the decision tree that led to this?”
“God, no,” Buffy said. “And scratch that free will thing for a moment. Just go ahead and make me scream.”
“Do you wish me to touch your secondary sexual characteristics?” the bot murmured sexily.
“What?”
“These?”
Buffy arched off the bed and uttered a small scream.
“Yes,” she breathed ecstatically, “yes, yes, yes!”
The Spikebot turned her over and placed her solicitously against a few pillows.
Buffy felt like smacking him and telling him to move on, but it would be wrong to treat the poor dumb thing like that.
He crouched over her on his knees, and the special part that Andrew had so kindly provided poked into her belly. Buffy melted and writhed, but he stared at her without moving.
“Do you wish me to proceed with the mating ritual?”
Buffy frowned. Damn Animal Planet. Andrew couldn’t have gotten HBO?
She sighed and sat up.
“Lie down. I’ll show you how. You pay attention and reciprocate later, okay? And stop the R2D2 babble. Just talk like you always do.”
“Talk dirty to me,” the Spikebot requested politely.
Buffy didn’t mind that. She straddled him, taking care to grind her warm butt down on his cool firm thighs. The bot’s lifelike penis jerked and he took a shuddery breath.
“Good reaction, botty,” Buffy said and bent over to kiss him. Andrew had said it was important to reinforce good behavior. Her nipples brushed his chest and the bot shimmied against her hips.
“Patience is a virtue,” Buffy said.
The room was getting hotter by the minute. She traced the bot’s abs with her French Manicures and heard his moans with satisfaction.
“Torture is an essential part of foreplay.”
She took his tiny man nipple into her mouth and sucked hard. She bit it lightly. The bots hands flailed against the sheets and Buffy wondered a bit about the kind of things Animal Planet showed these days. Or was it just biological imperatives it was obeying? The nipple plopped from her mouth, engorged and bright pink, leaving the Spikebot panting and Buffy surveyed proudly what her efforts had wrought so far.
“Girls like it too, when you suck their nipples,” she said pointedly.
The damn thing better have perfect memory. She wouldn’t like saying all these things twice. The Spikebot grabbed her ribcage, just below her breasts, and Buffy yodeled when his thumbs hit a particularly sensitive spot. His mouth descended on her nipples fiercely, and the last conscious corner of her mind wondered at the cool wetness of his mouth. She wished she’d taken the Buffybot for a test-drive once. She wouldn’t have felt shy about girl on girl sex if it had been a robot.
She scratched her way lightly down to where his hair began and pulled a wiry curl.
The bot cried out and writhed on her good cotton sheets. Her time in Italy had opened her eyes to modern design and she was happy he wasn’t writhing on those tacky floral sheets she used to have. This spring stripe was so much cooler.
Buffy licked her lips slowly. "Would you like me to touch you there?"
The bot said something garbled and intense.
"I didn’t catch that. Could you repeat it?"
Spikebot’s whole body was taut and quivering in agony. Buffy flicked out her tongue and gave him a little lick. He roared and nearly threw them both off the bed. Buffy felt sweat pearl between her breasts and she was a little out of breath. Time to end the tutorial for today.
"Well done," Buffy said approvingly. “I know you only know animal sex, not the human variety. Now on your Animal Planet watching, was there an animal you liked in particular? Would you like to mate with me like a lion? A gerbil? A giraffe, or any other animal of your choice?"
"Lion?" the bot said weakly.
Buffy nodded at him. "Go for it."
And Spikebot made like a lion and Buffy made like a lioness and the roaring shook the plaster from the ceiling, because it was an old house and the plaster had been there for decades.

Dawn took another bus from school, the one that came past Willow's apartment. There was no point in going back to her place. The lovebirds would still be around, cooing and twittering and showing no consideration for her single status. There had been mewling. The sex in her limited experience had not included mewling.
Willow opened the door in the middle of a phone call. She shooed Dawn in, but gestured her to keep silent. Her hair stood on end, she was still in pajamas and her eyes shot from red to black. Dawn eyed a couple of suspicious gouges in Willow's coffee table. A really big cat? The Spikebot? Willow in a fit of black-eyed rage?
"But I'd pay all the expenses. Really. You could just send me the photographs, or if you don’t want to lose them you could just scan them and email them to me? Or we could use Yousendit?"
The cell emitted loud braying and crackling. Willow held it away from her face with a pained expression.
"But I was her friend, Mr. Maclay. Because of the landslide in Sunnydale I have no photographs of her at a…"
The cell started to beep and Willow hurled the phone into the wall with a loud and heartfelt epithet. She froze it just before it would have smashed and sank into a chair.
"That--that ignorant hillbilly! Is that so much to ask? A couple of shots of his daughter? But no, he needed to get his rant on about witches and unnatural practices. Yokel."
Dawn debated what Willow needed most, caffeine or Valium, but she decided to for the useful ally venue instead of going for moral judgment. She ambled over to the kitchen to make coffee. When she returned Willow looked marginally calmer.
"Thanks, Dawnie, that’s great. You're a sweetie."
"I know what it’s like," Dawn said sympathetically. "Not having any photos of the people you’d like to remember. I don’t even have one of Mom."
Willow looked guilty. Guilt always worked on Willow, she was such an easy mark. The amount of ice-cream, pizzas and late night cable Dawn had managed to wangle out of her in the course of time was monumental. And as Willow was obviously gonna build a Tarabot, and therefore would be feeling guilty, Dawn figured that if she went for the attack, she'd gain less than if she went for the conciliatory mode.
"So, Willow, what was it like working on the Spikebot? I mean, it’s really awesome, you made even me think for a moment that it was real."
Willow lit up.
"Isn't it great? Andrew and I had such fun doing it! You should have seen him, welding and melting, ordering plastics from all over the world…and it’s turned out even greater than I thought."
"Yeah, it's amazing,” Dawn agreed politely. "What did you do?"
Willow nestled deeper in the couch and wiggled her bare feet. "I was in charge of the software. Decision trees, fuzzy logic…you know I even borrowed stuff from animations? Did you see Shrek 2, the making of? The software they used to make their characters move was really useful for getting him to walk like Spike instead of the Tin Man. And the self-learning capacity I designed is gonna make him even better. I predict that in the first week he'll have 117% of his original capacity. I'm sooo good."
"And you really saw Andrew put him together and spark him to life? Like Frankenstein?"
“Oh yeah. Screws and wires and all.”
Dawn was obscurely disappointed. So it really was a robot? She had to make absolutely sure.
"Can you open him up for me? So I can, you know, be really sure he's like the bot? Coz I found myself talking to him like he was the real Spike."
"That's a good thing, Dawn. That will reinforce his programming no end. If you respond to him like the real person, he's going to try and act like that person. And I'd have to ask Andrew about opening up. I guess he has some kind of maintenance thingy to do every now and then. Lube him up," Willow said with a wink.
Dawn smiled at Willow’s lame joke and thought harder.
"Willow, are you really, absolutely, hundred percent sure that Andrew didn’t double cross you and substitute the real Spike for the robot at some point?"
Willow's mouth hung open unflatteringly. "What? Real Spike? But Dawn! Spike is dead. Andrew told me himself. Or maybe Buffy did."
Dawn leaned forward and put her hands on Willow's pajama clad knee. "Seriously. We both know Andrew. Not completely getting the concept of trust and honesty, you know what I mean? And he totally had a boy crush on Spike. So what if Spike and he decided to trick us and they pulled it off somehow?"
Willow looked thoughtful. "Andrew is what he is, not your most normal, grounded, solid kind of personality."
Dawn mentally rolled her eyes. Sheesh, Willow, self-knowledge much?
"But no way could he have fooled me like that. I've seen every stage of the robot. I saw its first steps. I made its brain. I still have to program in its sexual functioning. It’s a big job."
Dawn shot upright. Sex! "They were having sex all morning until I escaped to school. Could a robot have convincing sex with Buffy? I can’t believe that. Buffy’s been around the block a couple of times, she’s had sex with vampires and immortals. She’d kind of notice if it didn’t work, right?"
Willow coughed delicately. "Erm, Dawnie, even if the robot knew nothing about sex, its body worked. Know what I mean? And believe, me, I had to interview Buffy on what she got up to with Spike, and that girl could teach a priest how-to in thirty minutes flat. Let alone an eager and willing robot, programmed to obey her. I guess you may have less than fun experiences with boys who didn’t know what to do, but if the girl knows enough, there's no problem."
"You interviewed Buffy on her sex life?" Dawn’s eyes almost popped out of her head. She could so use some of that savvy in her dealing with Italian boyfriends. "Can I see that file?"
"Of course not! That’s private!" Willow said sternly but her eyes had slid to her bookcase for a second, where neat rows of color coded binders with printed labels proclaimed loudly what was inside them.
Dawn filed the knowledge away for later swiping.
"So there’s no hope whatsoever that it’s the real Spike?”
Willow shook her head.
”Oh," Dawn said.
It was hard to get her mind around it. Or maybe it was her heart and guts that were balking. She realized she really would have liked to see Spike again. Damn. She was gonna get all weepy. Dawn fled to the bathroom and after a hefty does of cold water she decided she could face Willow.
Willow went all motherly and concerned over, her, or anyway she tried, coz Willow didn’t have a motherly bone in her body as far as Dawn was concerned.
"Why are you so upset about it, Dawn? Even supposing it was Spike- which is absolutely impossible - why the urge to flush him out? He’d have his reasons to pretend being a robot, wouldn't he?"
"Insane reasons to do with my fucked up sister," Dawn said bitterly.
“I thought you and Buffy were getting along better these days."
"Yeah, we are, kind of. But don’t think we've ever talked about Spike. Subject absolutely non grata in the Summers home. He was my friend too, you know."
"I thought you threatened to set him on fire?" Willow inquired gently.
"Well, yeah. Then! But he died, the jerk, and I didn’t think he would and then it was too late to make up."
Dawn felt Willow's eyes on her, all soft and gooey, and she couldn’t bear it for another second.
"Thanks, Willow. See you!"
So he was a bot. Okay. She’d deal. She’d be the best friend a Spikebot could have. She knew Buffy; all she would teach him was icky things in the bedroom and some fighting, because that’s all she’d ever wanted in a boyfriend. She had a crystal clear duty to teach the bot everything else, to help him be a good bot and as much a person as he could be. She could help him evolve and stand up for himself. She knew just the DVDs to help him with that.

When the door had banged shut after a downcast Dawn, Willow sat motionless on her couch and thought. Deeply. After a few minutes she fished out the creased and softened little portrait that was the only photo of Tara she had. So maybe she'd have to say goodbye to her dream of seeing Tara again, huh? It was hard to imagine that the little twerp could have double-crossed her, Willow, witch extraordinaire, software wizard and no slouch anywhere else. But obviously she'd wanted to believe in building a real live android because she'd been hoping to make another one. She'd better make sure. And if Andrew and his buddy Spike had tried to pull one over on her they'd find out what it was like to deal with one pissed-off witch!
The thought of all those hours she'd put it was enough to make a woman sick. Decision trees until she dreamed of deforestation, fuzzy logic until it coated her tongue. Oh, Andrew was so going to get it.
Willow got up to shower and dress first. It was hard to chew someone out when you were dressed in bunny pajama bottoms and had bed hair. When she was clean, had on favorite outfit and hair Titian would have liked to paint, she settled herself behind her desk for a serious convo with Andrew. Notebook open. New pen. Pencil sharp. Red marker. Green marker.
She picked up her cell and located the speed dial for Andrew, but then she reconsidered. It was always better to act from a firm knowledge base. She’d phone Giles first.
"Willow! What a lovely surprise to hear from you! How are things in Rome? How is Buffy taking the Immortal, um, thing?"
"She's fine," Willow cut in impatiently. "I need your help, Giles. Information."
"Of course, my dear. That's what colleagues are for."
“It’s Spike,” Willow said. ”He’s been sighted and I need to know if it could be him or if it’s an impostor."
"Spike? Spike is dead. I thought you knew."
"Yeah, that's what I thought. But how do we know? Sighting, reliable informer or hearsay?"
Willow could almost hear Giles taking of his glasses. Or maybe scratching his head, now that he was invisible.
"Now that you mention it, I think I heard of it from Andrew. Yes, I'm quite sure. He told me Angel, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce and several other people whose names escapes me at present, died in last year's Los Angeles landslide-gang-warfare thing."
Willow sucked on her teeth. "O-kay. That's not really conclusive, is it? Is there a way to get first-hand, reliable info on that? Who's our man in Los Angeles?"
Giles clucked like a hen. "Didn't you read my memo? Faith has been transferred there from Cleveland. The council has a network in place there. I'll get her on it as soon as she's awake."
"It's nine A.M. there, Giles. Wake her up! This is important!"
"May I remind you that Slayers work late nights?" Giles said disapprovingly.
Faith was his new golden girl, tirelessly slaying, all mission. A Watcher’s dream. Kennedy had bitched about it incessantly. Willow rubbed her forehead and was ready to finish the call, but true to form, Giles had questions of his own.
"Do enlighten me about that Spike sighting, Willow. When, where, by whom?"
Trust Giles to ask the very question she would have liked to avoid.
"Er, that's kind of complicated. By me, Andrew, Buffy and Dawn, yesterday and today. He's in Buffy's apartment as we speak."
"What?" Giles stuttered. "Are you pulling my leg? If you have the blighter right there, why do you need confirmation?"
Willow made faces into the phone. How to put this?
"It’s kinda like he's a robot, which we thought Andrew made, but then again maybe he’s not. Dawn seems to think he’s the real deal."
"Dawn is a very intelligent young woman," Giles opined.
By implication, she wasn't? Thanks you so much for the ego boost, Giles.
"What does Buffy think?"
Buffy's been boinking the little toaster till his wiring popped out of his ears?
"Buffy thinks he's been made for her pleasure and she's feeling a great deal of that," Willow said
“Oh, thank you so much,” Giles said, "that’s exactly what I didn’t need to know." He coughed and cleared his throat. "On the other hand,” he went on mercilessly, "even though Buffy isn’t the academic type, her intuitions are usually absolutely spot-on. If she doesn’t think anything’s amiss, why would you?"
True. In the case of evil hanky panky, Buffy could be aboslutely trusted to sense if something was off. In matters of the heart? Not so much. Willow decided to ask Buffy about it in private. She'd need Buffy's help anyway to get Dawn off her case.

Part 3
Buffy returned from a blood buying expedition to find her sister and her robot happily ensconced on the couch. What were they watching? Italian afternoon TV had never managed to grab her attention for long. Ah. She spied the closing scene of ‘I, Robot’. Trust Dawn to pick that one.
"See, Spikebot," Dawn lectured, "this robot wasn’t half as evolved as you are, but it still had free will. It didn’t want to do evil. You could be the same. Choose your own destiny and become a free bot!"
Spikebot looked up at Buffy and smiled sweetly, tilting his head. "I choose to be with Buffy. Voluntarily."
Buffy's heart glowed warmly and she smiled her widest smile back at her bot. "Damn right it is. I'm going to take my Spikebot out for a nice bracing workout. That’s free will too."
"No, Buffy, that’s you telling him what to do. Bot?"
The bot shrugged. "I like you too, Dawn. But slaying with Buffy makes my circuits tingle."
"But I want to watch AI with you! Look, that movie asks an existential question: is a robot as much a sentient as a human being? Can a robot dream?"
"Only about electric sheep," the bot smiled and got up to follow Buffy into the kitchen.
Dawn threw a pillow in their general direction. Buffy ducked and threw it back with Slayer accuracy.
"Leave Spikebot alone, Dawnie. If he wants free will he'll ask for it, right?"
"Right," Spikebot smiled slowly at her and curled his tongue. "Where are we going, love? Coliseum again, Forum Romanum?"
Buffy absently opened the fridge stared at yesterday's pizza and day before yesterday's lasagna. "Stroll along the Tiber?"
"Whatever you like, Buffy."
"I like it when you call me Buffy."
"I like it when you call me Spike. What other things could you call me?"
"How about baby? Honey? Lover?"
Spikebot grabbed her by the waist and kissed her slowly and thoroughly. Dawn made gagging noises from the direction of the door. Well, Dawn could shove her disapproval where the sun didn’t shine.
"You can’t have it both ways, Dawnie! Kissing and giving free will is not exactly mistreating,” Buffy said around Spikebot's tongue.
"It can too be both ways," Dawn said. "You're using him like your walking talking vibrator. How can that ever be good?"
"I thought I was treating him like a person. Where's the bad in that?"
"Buffy, he has no choice about it! No more than the microwave has."
"I think I have a few more options than on, off and defrost," the Spikebot said quietly.
“You have like combination oven microwave functions, Spike,” Buffy said fondly. “You have a crunchy setting, and I’m especially fond of your steaming.”
Buffy couldn’t see Dawn, because Spikebot was kissing her again, but she just knew Dawn was rolling her eyes and/or making other faces, none of them having to do with sisterly love and respect.
"Don't break your pretty little head about it, Nibblet."
"Dawn would like to lead the revolt of dishwashers and remote controls the world over," Buffy said.
"Don’t tease the girl, Buffy," Spikebot said.
"You're so human-centric, Buffy. As if all beings that have been made, not born, have to be lower creatures, without a soul or free will," Dawn said heatedly.
Ah. Now Buffy got it. Spikebot had gotten it from the start, apparently.
Buffy walked up to Dawn and embraced her. "I concede equal rights to all sentient creatures, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. Including Free Willy here."
"Hear, hear," Spikebot said.
Dawn made a big duh-face at her, but Buffy knew she’d hit the sore spot.
*
“Buffy? Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Buffy looked up from where she was lying, cuddled against the Spikebot’s chest, mindlessly stroking his forearm with a finger.
“Yeah?”
“Um, alone?”
With a sigh Buffy entangled her limbs from the Spikebot. He didn’t speak, just regarded Dawn with his impenetrable blue gaze.
“You can have her back in a few minutes,” Dawn promised.
He smiled and reached for the remote. “Ta.”
Buffy sat down at the kitchen table. “Well?”
Dawn shuffled with her feet and then decided that sitting down and leaning earnestly forward would show the right attitude. “Buffy,” she started again. “About the Spikebot.”
“Yeah?” Buffy said, expectant but still relaxed.
Dawn hoped that the relaxed bit was going to stay if she went on talking. “You do know about the Spikebot, don’t you?”
Buffy tensed a little but her face remained smooth. “Sure. He’s back in the living room, surfing Italian channels for big breasted, fake-blonde presenters.”
Dawn rolled her eyes. What could you say to a sister who pretended she was a real blonde, even to the person who’d know her from her fifth year and who found the empty Miss Clairol packets in the bathroom bin? “Yeah, well. I meant, you do know what he is, right?”
It would be so icky, and incredibly sad too, if Buffy didn’t know. For her and Spikebot.
“Of course I do, Dawn. What do you think I am, blind and insane?”
Better not answer that. There was no way to come out on points and still maintain self-respect.
So should she come out and ask what Buffy knew? For some reason she didn’t want to. She’d gotten vibes from both the bot and Buffy that the subject was absolutely to be avoided. “So when did you know?”
Buffy smiled. “Within five minutes. Sooner, probably. Come on, I’m a vampire Slayer. You think I don’t know the difference between a robot and a vampire? Please.”
“That is so romantic!” Dawn squealed.
They hugged.
“You know what? Remember the Buffybot and how everybody thought it was you at first?”
Dawn prudently refrained from mentioning she had been among the headblind back then.
“Do I? One of the most humiliating moments in my life. When my best friends, my sister” - Crap, Buffy did remember – “thought I was a mindless, endlessly perky robot with too many teeth? How could I forget.”
“So it’s really only you who can distinguish between a robot and a vampire at first sight.”
Buffy looked at her oddly, as if she didn’t know what Dawn meant by saying that. They had been on the same wavelength just now, right?
“Actually, Dawn, yeah. I even managed to fool Spike for about a minute. Although I have to say in defense that he was majorly beaten up at that time.”
Dawn nodded. “That’s why I went to Willow to find out if he was real or not. Because it’s the worst thing for a person if everyone thinks they’re something they’re not. I just thought you should know.”
Buffy tensed for real now. “So Willow knows you mistook the Spikebot for the real Spike?”
“Yeah.”
“Do we know our Willow?”
“I guess we do,” Dawn answered slowly.
“So there’s gonna be trouble.”
“Yep.”
*
Giles pressed Buffy’s buzzer and waited. He rubbed his eyes tiredly and set down his luggage. Was it possible to have jetlag if the time zone was only one hour earlier? It felt like jet lag, with a hangover and a crick in his neck thrown in. Travel was evil when one was over fifty and had been hit on the head as many times as he'd been.
To his surprise Willow opened the door. "Willow! Wonderful to see you, dear girl. Perhaps we can have a word alone for a minute before I meet the others?"
"Giles!" Buffy called out from the living room and ran to meet him. She hugged him tightly, but not as tight as she used to. He was actually quite gratified he rated hugging again. Relations had been a bit strained for quite a while after Sunnydale. She was looking better too.
"Buffy, my dear, you look absolutely radiant."
"As long as you don’t mean that I look pregnant, I'm glad to hear it,” Buffy said and led him to the living room.
Giles tried to signal Willow with his eyes but she seemed oblivious to his winking and eyebrow waggling.
"Look who's here, guys,” Buffy said, "one long lost Watcher!"
Next to Dawn, who seemed about the same height as last time for a change, there sat a familiar white-haired figure, one paw around a glass of booze, an unlit cigarette in the other. The culprit himself.
"Giles!” Dawn waved gaily. "Have you come to check the Spikebot out? Here he is. Isn’t he just like the real thing?"
"As a matter of fact,” Giles began and removed his glasses to settle down for some lucid exposition.
Buf

Buffy sighed and worked harder than she had in a long time to keep Giles off the public speaking, where he was inevitably going to say all the things she wanted left unsaid. She didn’t see how she was going to be able to prevent it altogether, short of drugging his coffee or hitting him on the head. On that thought, she unearthed the Spikebot’s Scotch and poured Giles a generous amount.
"The sun’s at least a yard over the arm, Giles,” she said. "You look like you need it."
Giles took the glass, but since he had a Dawn-prepared cappuccino in his left hand he looked a tad panicky until Buffy rescued him and relieved him of the coffee.
She surveyed the room. It had been a long time since she’d seen so many Scoobies in one place. She wouldn’t be surprised if Xander showed up out of Africa to make the group complete. As usual, everybody was trying to have a say in her choice of lover, and she was determined that this time nobody was going to get in a word against him. She and the Spikebot together had things pretty much arranged to their liking and she didn’t need anybody butting in. She was feeling happier than she had in years, and if she was a little giddy, so what?
But no, they wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Dawn she could forgive for her curiosity and poking and prying, since she had a little more riding on it than just curiosity and a fondness of judging Buffy, and she’d help out now. But the others…
She pressed her lips firmly together. They’d had a tendency to curl upwards at the corners the past week, and that made it harder to hold on to a stern expression.
She could understand, though, why the powers or whoever that be had made Slayers tend toward depression. Being happy was hell on your focus and follow-through. She observed how Willow was converging on Giles with a determined expression on her face. Dawn had owned up to going to Willow with her doubts and suspicions instead of to her, her sister, and Buffy knew Willow well enough that she could be made to doubt anything, except perhaps her own excellence.
Spikebot chose this moment to guffaw at something Dawn said and to cuff her playfully about the head. Yeah, like that was sensible. Worst moment, too. She caught his eye and he subsided into a smooth blandness of body language that was just amazing. She'd have to act, she guessed, to get rid of the avid looks both Willow and Giles were wearing when they looked at Spikebot. That wouldn’t do at all.
"Willow, Giles, kitchen, now," she said, and was gratified when they both complied.
They responded well to urgency, still, like they used to in the Sunnydale days. Of course, then they always went off on their own peculiar tangents instead of listening to her intuitions like they should, since those always turned out to be right.
"Giles," Willow started, "did you find out anything about LA?"
"Buffy,” Giles started simultaneously, "I have to tell you, that this is…"
Buffy made the pause-sign, and when that didn’t work stomped her feet and shouted at them to shut up. They did, looking very surprised.
"Lemme get my say in first, okay?” Buffy said. "Willow, would you go into the hall and wait, and not speak to anybody about anything? Please? I need to talk to Giles for a moment."
Willow looked hurt. Not to know things, to be out of the loop, was one of the things Willow hated and dreaded the most. She’d just have to deal.
When Willow had left, Buffy stepped up closer to Giles.
"Giles. Dear Giles. I have a big, big favor to ask. Could you please say nothing about what you found out? Nothing, to nobody? Not to me, not to Willow, Andrew, Dawn, Spikebot, no one. Not even Xander if he suddenly shows up here. Or anybody in the whole world. Do you get it, Giles? I'm really, really happy like this, and that only works because of a kind of balance, a kind of deal I made. So I don’t want to know. That's the only way that this works."
"But Buffy," Giles began, baffled as she'd known he would be.
"Giles, we've had our differences. But you've been like a father to me, for a long time, and that was wonderful. But then I had to grow up, and I did, and could you please trust me to know what's best for my happiness? Don’t say anything. Let it be, okay?"
She looked up at him, willing him to get it. For once.
Giles stuttered, threw his hands in the air, stuffed them back in his pocket and started to pace, which the kitchen wasn’t really big enough for.
"Buffy, that's going against everything I hold dear. To know, to impart essential information is the very core of my professional integrity. I couldn't possibly - and Willow expressly asked me to -”
Buffy held silent, just looking at him and waiting.
"Not even Willow? As a professional courtesy? Because she asked?"
Buffy shook her head.
Giles puffed out his breath loudly. "Buffy, I can't...!"
"Please?"
"Are you happy? Are you sure? Is this what makes you happy?"
Buffy nodded and loosed the restraints on her smile. It burst out, tugging irrepressibly towards her ears. “I am. Really, truly, madly."
"Madly, truly, deeply, " Giles corrected automatically. "Alright. I will. Because you have the right to determine this for yourself. Yes. I will forever hold silent."
Buffy swallowed a lump in her throat, and even though the smile was still in place, her eyes welled over and she had to sniffle in a loud and undignified manner. Giles gravely held out a real, ironed, folded, pale blue checked handkerchief and that was too much. She hurled herself in his arms and had a wonderful moment that was both tweedy and blubbery.
"Thank you, sweet, sweet Giles. Thank you so much. I love you."
Giles coughed and blinked away a little mote of dust in his eyes.
"Yes, well, my dear girl. Gladly done. Be happy."
“I will," Buffy said.
She glanced at the closed door. She hoped Willow had had the restraint not to have her ear pressed up against it. She tiptoed over to it and jerked it open. Good. Willow was sullenly leading against the opposite wall.
"Willow! Please come in."
"You guys done talking secrets I'm not allowed to hear?" Willow said, sulking predictably.
"We just needed to have a little Slayer-Watcher closing ceremony kind of moment,” Buffy said. "No big."
"Well?” Willow said. "What’s the sitch? Trouble brewing? "
Buffy looked at Giles.
He coughed and got out the handkerchief again to polish his glasses, but Buffy snot and tears had rendered it into something like an oyster without the shell. He made do with a slip of his shirt.
"Willow, Buffy’s asked me not to disclose the information from LA. For private reasons. But I think you will find that Andrew has spoken the truth to you throughout."
Willow’s face fell for a moment, but then she brightened. "Cool. I knew I would have sensed it if that little weasel was double crossing me. Ha. I'm the best robot software designer ever."
The lock snicked and Buffy heard Andrew come in. She made mental note to make him give back his key. He didn’t live here anymore; no need for him to come in at all hours.
"Hi Andrew!" Willow said brightly.
"Hi Willow, Buffy, Giles,” Andrew said, throwing an assessing look at Buffy from the corners of his eyes.
"Hi Andrew,” Buffy said and hugged him. "You did such great work on the bot, it’s really awesome. I'm still super happy with him. He walks, talk, patrols - I couldn’t wish for more."
Andrew looked relieved. Oops. She'd better not forget to include Willow.
"And you too, Will. It's amazing, the job you guys did."
"Absolutely," Giles agreed.
They all trooped back to the living room, and Buffy smiled widely at Dawn and the Spikebot to signal all was well.
"It's like a party!” Andrew crowed. "A Scooby gang reunion, celebrating all those years we worked and fought together!"
"Andrew…" Willow warned.
"Okay, so me, not so much, but in spirit I was always with you guys, Just like Jonathan."
"Have some popcorn, Andrew," Buffy offered. Anything to stop up the Andrew mouth thing.
The bell rang.
"Wouldn’t it be perfect if that was the missing Scooby?" Andrew went on, undeterred by a mouthful of maize kernels.
Buffy went to open the door and got caught in a crushing hug by a bronzed one-eyed giant, smelling off cloves, curry and airplane seats.
"Xander!" she squeaked. "You look great. You’re so thin, and so tan!"
"African food and sunshine will do that for ya,” Xander agreed. "Are those the voices of red haired witches and again librarians I hear? I smell the sweet scent of Sunnydale High memories!"
"Come in, come in,” Buffy said.
She hadn’t decided yet if she felt hijacked or overjoyed by this hefty dose of past friendships. Her smile had no qualms though, it just went all out and she decided to go along with it.
"Xander!" Willow screamed and jumped him.
Dawn have an identical shriek and joined the ongoing huddle.
Giles smiled and waited with that patient thing he did, because he was old and British like that.
"Harris," a deep voice said, calmly, and Xander twitched visibly.

Xander made a gap between the two sweet girls covering him and espied the form of a formerly much despised, grudgingly accepted ally whose file he’d closed and put away in a deep drawer to gather dust. A quick survey of the room told him everyone was smiling. So Spike being back was a happy occasion, he guessed. Well. Gosh darn. A Harris could be gracious and flexible, too, and he had nothing to fear anyway.
"Spike!" he boomed. "Back from the dead. Again. How’s hell been treating ya?"
It’s not as if he was insensitive. Really not. He could tell straightaway that there was flinching going on, and Willow was making frantic signs at him he’d forgotten how to interpret. Had those hand signals meant something to him in grade school? He couldn’t remember, but he’d learned something. Once he’d have reacted to tension with frantic babbling to hide his insecurity, but he was a man of the world now, experienced at dealing with strange cultures. Shutting up and smiling was generally a good bet and tided you over until you could make sense of it all. And even if that point was never reached, which happened more often than you'd think, you hadn’t insulted anyone. All that was missing now was someone offering him goat brains and fermented mare’s milk. The new, suave Xander Harris didn’t balk at either of those things, no sir. Cosmopolitan, global citizen, that was him.
The brilliant Harris strategy was working, because the twitching subsided and the smile reappeared. He grinned back and accepted coke and pop-corn, allowing the girls to seat him between them. Yep, you could never go back to high school, Xander reflected sadly. The friends you once knew how to read down to the slightest wiggle and snort, now were like alien beings or African villagers. Life was just like that. Reared up and bit you in the toned butt without warning.

Buffy’s hand snuck out and pinched the Spikebot’s ass. He twitched and threw her one of these blue, languid looks that made her turn to Jell-O Buffy on the inside. The evening had been much fun, seeing all her old friends together, but now she just wanted to go out and patrol with the Bot until they both couldn’t stand up anymore.
“Duty calls, people,” she said, standing up and holding out her hand to Spikebot, who took it as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Which it had been, a whole week already. The best week of her life.
“Axe?” Spikebot suggested and hefted Axcalibur.
“Nah, it’s wasted on the local talent. I’ll go with the sword and a fresh stake. You’re still the best at whittling, you know.”
“Dawn and me had some time on our hands. Our pleasure.”
Buffy sniffed the smooth, wickedly pointed stake. “The nice, piney smell of new stake. That’s always a good start to a patrol.”
Spikebot slung on his duster and held out his hand. “Let’s go kill something, Buffy.”
They dusted a few hapless cruising tourists who spoke only their own weird language.
“Do you know what they were saying, Spike?”
Spikebot shrugged and slapped some dust from his shiny black sleeve. “Sounded Transylvanian to me. Looking for Dracula.”
“Really? You think I killed Drac, you know, way back when?”
“Doubt it. Bugger’s too bloody slippery to get killed that easily. Dunno what they wanted from you. Mostly missed the finer points, you know. Don’t really speak Transylvanian beyond, like, point me to the virgins, or um, there’s a spot on your neck, can I help you wipe it off?”
“Right. Still. It’s always nice to know there’s bad guys who are out for me. Makes a Slayer feel like she’s still making an impression on the world.”
Spike pushed her against an ancient stone wall and kissed her roughly. Kissing against monuments was one of those things that made living in Rome extra special. American walls in your back always felt more transient. Flimsy modern stuff. Not like this wall was gonna fall down the minute your vampire banged you up against it…
They strolled on.
“You know, Spike, since evil doesn’t really come looking for me anymore, because they probably get waylaid on the first corner out by one of the gazillion Slayers out there, how about we go looking for it? Spike & Buffy, Inc, You Name It, We Kill It?”
“Sounds dandy, Slayer. I’d go for it. We’d have to figure out some kind of rating structure, though, billing could be a pain.”
“Whoa, you really have been working for a law firm, honey.”
Spikebot’s answer was muffled in a dull thump. His hand was torn out of Buffy’s and she couldn’t see him anymore; he was covered by a heaving mass of bright pink jelly with raisins in it, or anyway the demonic equivalent, like evil raisins, she guessed.
“Spike!” she yelled and hacked at the surging blob. It parted easily and emitted a stream of stinky chartreuse gas.
“Shocking pink and chartreuse, are you kidding me? That is so last year. Is that what I’m reduced, killing last year’s demons? Well, my powers are better than ever, and I’ll show you a fashion disaster if you don’t let go of my boyfriend!”
Buffy stabbed the thing through one of its raisins and it knotted and twisted and started to split into two.
“Die! Die, you evil monster!”
A splotch of monster fell on her hand and burned like acid. Oh God, it might even dissolve a vampire? She’d like discovered a whole new way of killing vampires. She could carry a big tank of acid on her back and spray them to death. The fear bunched in Buffy’s chest and she hacked more frantically. No, she couldn’t! She might accidentally hack of Spike’s head!
She sobbed, panicking, slicing away at the edges of the two blobs, but they only turned into more separate blobs and Spike was nowhere to be seen.
“Um, Slayer? What are you doing? You’re only making more of them. "
Buffy gasped at the sound of Spike's voice and turned to see him standing there, the bastard, smirking and smoking and generally being completely okay and undamaged.
She took a deep breath to tell him exactly what she thought of him and was shocked at the noise that came out of her mouth. " I hate you!" she screamed. "I hate you I hate you I hate you!"
She fell on him, her hands flailing at his solid presence, sobbing too hard to speak.
Spike just held her very tightly. "Shh, love, Buffy, it’s alright, I'm here. Never leaving you."
"You just did!" she said. "You left. You were gone. I couldn’t find you."
"Shh. I'll always find my way back to you, don’t forget. Always."
His lips were cool and delicious against her heated skin. He licked the tears away from her cheeks and they stumbled, almost losing their balance, as their embrace became more urgent.
"Spike…I love you so much."
"Love you too, Buffy."
Spike ended up with his back against one of Rome's nice solid walls, and Buffy held on tightly to the lapels of his coat as she stood on tiptoe to kiss him. She needed to be closer, and why were they wearing all these silly clothes, that weren’t even necessary in Rome's mild climate. She jerked that stupid heavy coat down his shoulders, so that just a strip of creamy skin showed between the bunched material and his sleeves. She kissed that piece of skin, which was maybe the softest on his whole body, right there on the inside of his arm where it bulged over his biceps.
“I love your arms,” she said.
Spike laughed. “Love yours, too, sweetheart.”
“I mean it!” she said and bit lightly into the smooth springy stuff under her lips.
Spike growled deep in his chest and ripped her shirt off in one fast, unexpected movement. Buffy’s breath left her in a squeaky sigh and she closed her eyes and stilled her busy hands, wishing she could just feel and have the feelings wash over her. She wanted to be submerged.
Spike sensed her mood and Buffy gave over to sensations, rough stone against her back, rough velvet hands under her ass as she was lifted up against his body, the cool night air on her heated, moist flesh, the friction of his cock sliding inside her, feeling like heat while she knew it wasn’t. With her eyes tightly shut every sensation was tripled, more weighty. Her hands clenched of their own accord, because she sure wasn’t up to sending them commands, she was all feeling. Love and lust careened through her yearning, passive body and passed through to Spike, who labored and panted and grunted harshly into her mouth.
“It’s never been like this before, Spike, right?”
“Never, love, never,” Spike said into her neck and his whole body shuddered against her. Buffy couldn’t remember if she had come, but it didn’t matter. They were one. The slightest movement of his hands on her skin made her insides flutter and clench, a kiss sent her into raptures, color after color flashing against her closed eyelids.
Part 4
Willow sat on the couch, drank diet Cokes and bided her time. She was going to pounce on Giles tonight and she was prepared to wait everyone out, even if she was not only jittery with caffeine, but also yawning every minute and yearning for her own apartment and soft bed with a vengeance.
At last Dawn let go of Xander, both metaphorically and literally, which fired a surprising amount of possessiveness in Willow, and announced her intention to go to bed. That led to a flurry of making up the spare bed for Giles and the decision that Xander would bunk with Willow, and while Dawn and Xander were getting sheets and pillows Willow saw her chance.
"Giles," she said.
Giles stiffened and slowly turned to her, the look on his face stating with embarrassing clarity that he saw right through her. Well, okay, maybe she wasn’t much for subtlety after one o’clock in the morning. Big deal.
"Willow," he answered.
Willow didn't intend to give up yet, even if he looked all reprovey and Watchery at her. Sheesh, she just wanted some information, not like that was a crime, was it?
"Giles, I promise I'll never say a word of this to anyone, not Buffy, not Spike, Dawn, Xander, anyone, ever. But I think I deserve to know! I started it. I designed the damn bot, even if Andrew helped. What exactly did you find out in LA?"
Giles folded his arms. "Willow, weren't you paying attention when Buffy asked us not to do this? I'm not going to say anything. I think we should respect her request. She deserves a little happiness."
Willow stubbornly folded her arms. She could play the body language game too. "And I don't deserve happiness? A little closure on what happened? It’s not as if I didn’t expend any effort on making Buffy happy, did I?"
Giles didn’t answer, but got up and left the room. Willow followed as Giles went into the hall to retrieve his carryall and then to the spare room, where Dawn was making up the bed.
"Thanks Dawn," Giles said. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "I need sleep. Not as young as I used to be."
Willow rolled her eyes. "Aren’t we all?"
Dawn looked at her oddly and wished them goodnight.
Giles sat down and took off his jacket. "I beg of you, Willow. Not now. Any minute now I’m going to take off my shoes, and I advise you to be elsewhere by then."
"Giles! You're being unfair, and using foot odor to deter me is really not cool. I'm firm in the face of stinky socks! Your feet are not going to make me run away."
Giles sighed. “Willow, please take pity on an old, tired man. I do not want of fend off your questions."
"Well then don't!" Willow said desperately. "Don’t fend them off. Just answer me, okay? I need to know some stuff!"
"Willow, I have expressly waived my right to know stuff, as you put it so eloquently, in the face of Buffy's needs. Please do the same."
Willow put on her resolve face, because it was really hard not to give in if Giles looked like that. His face was grey and shadowed and his hands shook. He’d gotten these really old, hairy, wrinkly hands. She’d never noticed before.
No. She’d remain firm.
"I'll make it easy on you, Giles. I’ll provide the answers, and you can just say 'yes’ or 'no', or shake your head or something. That way you won’t have to feel you’ve been disloyal to Buffy."
Giles shrugged. "Go home, Willow. I’m not going to react."
"I think you discovered in LA that Spike is dead, the dead-dead kind of dead."
Willow looked hard at Giles' face. He cast his eyes down and started to undo the laces on his big brown brogues, but she felt quite sure that he agreed. Something in his body language said so,
"It’s a yes, isn’t it, Giles?" She was sure it was. “Okay, so Spikebot is really a Spikebot. Right?"
Again the subtle tells that she was right. She tested it by making a statement she suspected to be totally false. "Spike is the real, unliving Spike."
Yes! There it was the looking away, the infinitesimal shift of his shoulders away from her. Bingo. Spikebot was confirmed. The big question that remained was what on earth had possessed Buffy to pretend that he was the real thing? Buffy wasn’t insane or delusional. Willow had liked the challenge of making a robot to rival the one Warren made, but she hadn’t for a moment thought that he'd be anything more than a big vibrator that might not fit in Buffy’s nightstand drawer, but still didn’t do much more than that.
Puzzling.
She stretched. A big yawn split her face. "Good night, Giles. I'll come over tomorrow and we can do some sightseeing together, okay?"
Giles looked at her with a defeated expression. His face looked even more fragile and creased. "Willow? You’re not going to go haring off, drawing conclusions I never confirmed, are you? Think of what we promised Buffy!"
Willow almost went over to ruffle his thinning, graying hair. “Of course not, Giles! What do you think I am? I’m Buffy’s friend. It’s my job to protect her against disappointments."
Willow turned and left the room. She ignored Giles bewildered "Willow? What are you talking about? Willow?" She waved a cheery goodnight to Dawn and proceeded to ferry Xander and his suitcases to Casa Rosenberg.
*
Xander folded himself in Willow's tiny car and stared at Rome in daylight as they drove themselves back to Buffy’s apartment. It was pretty, but it only made him ache for Sunnydale in a way that Africa’s dusty strangeness didn’t.
"Hey, Will, I didn't want to ask the Buffster, but what’s the deal with Spike? I thought he was dead, actually."
Willow waggled her auburn eyebrows in a gesture that was probably meant to convey volumes, but while Xander had gained the ability to speak a few words of Swahili and Kikuyu, he'd lost the ability to translate Willow-speak.
"The eyebrow twitch meaning what, exactly?"
"Oh Xander, are you blind? That isn’t Spike. It's ….oops. I'm not supposed to tell. I can tell you, though, but only if you swear you won’t breathe a word of this to Buffy and Spike and Giles and Andrew. Not a word to anyone, ever."
"Sure," Xander agreed. He had the strangest feeling that he was never going to meet any of his friends ever again, that the little red car careening over the Roman thoroughfares was on its way to somewhere unfamiliar.
Willow bent her head closer to his, which made Xander cast a nervous eye to traffic. It was more orderly than Nairobi, which wasn’t saying much, but he preferred a driver with her eyes on the road.
"It’s really a Spikebot, you know. Andrew and I made it for Buffy."
"It’s a robot?" Xander said and tried to remember if he’d caught any signs of robotness from Spike last night. He'd seemed just like the real Spike, all snarky and smoking evil cigarettes and mooning after Buffy. Of course, the new thing had not so much been Spike as it was seeing Buffy moon right back. It was a thing he'd suspected going on back in Sunnydale in spite of Buffy’s avowals that she was over him, but the observed reality had seemed kinda sweet rather than unnatural and sick. Like proof you could get used to anything, if you had enough time.
"Really? Poor Buffy. Does she know it’s a robot?"
"She’s like the Slayer, Xander. Of course she knows. She's not impaired or anything. But the thing is, see, that she doesn't want us to know. She asked Giles and me in so many words to pretend it was the real Spike. Can you believe that? I don’t get it. I mean, why? Having a robot that good is pretty special of its own accord; I see no need to pretend it’s the real thing. That only leads to sadness and dependency."
"Right. So I should still go along with that, with the pretend-Spiking of that robot? For Buffy’s sake?"
Willow nodded vigorously.
"Well, sure, I can do that for the Buffster. Not as if I noticed it wasn’t the real thing. I don’t have your robot detecting antenna, I guess," Xander said sadly.
He felt bad for Buffy. It must be horrible to be so lonely that you made a robot of your formerly evil, doubly dead, dusty ex-boyfriend and then to go and pretend it was real? Maybe she should get Prozac or something. Whoa. He shook his head. The Buffy he looked up to and had never quite given up the hope of dating seemed very far in the past. Poor Buffy.
Still, yesterday she hadn’t seemed to be poor Buffy. She’d seemed happy glowy Buffy, she with the widest smile north of the equator. He resolved not to follow Willow’s lead just yet but to be observey first. Let Buffy call her own destiny.
*
Willow must have been wearing something on her face, she guessed, because Andrew cringed the moment he caught sight of her. Or maybe he was just surprised to see Xander. No, that couldn’t be it. He’d seen Xander last night. She nodded at Giles and Buffy, who were having a coffee and talking about some demon Buffy'd vanquished, erm, killed, last night.
"Hey, Andrew!" she said.
"Hey Willow,: Andrew said meekly and tried to draw closer to Spike, but she was being ruthlessly girly today and forced herself in the narrow space between the two guys.
”Spike!" she said brightly. "I mean, Spikebot!"
Spikebot frowned mightily at her but held his peace. Which so proved he wasn't the real Spike, because he would have had a snarky expression just popping her straight in the nose.
"I'm confused," she continued. "I just can’t get it straight what to call you. Do you prefer Spike or Spikebot?"
"Don’t care either way, Rosenberg," Spike said curtly and made to rise but she held his arm, so that if he had a polite bone in his body, or adhered properly to his civility algorithms, he'd sit down again. He sat.
Willow left her hand on his. "Your skin is really a miracle," she said in a low voice. “It’s so lifelike. It's like I can actually see each individual hair. How did you do that, Andrew? Can you order fake skin like that or did you put all the hairs, or the nylon thread, separately?"
Spikebot looked puzzled. "What are you talking about, Willow? What the bloody hell's Andrew got to do with my body hair?"
A light went off in Willow’s head. Oh! The Spikebot himself wasn’t aware that he was a robot. He thought he was the real Spike. So Buffy didn’t want them to talk about it because it might hurt his little plastic feelings. That was so sweet. And now that she was thinking about it seriously, without the hurty feelings getting in the way, it was just like Buffy, who’d spent hours talking to the dying April bot. Willow was a bad, bad friend for forgetting about that side of Buffy. Of course that was the explanation for Buffy's weird request. Well, she was cool. She wouldn’t let on to the poor thing that it wasn’t real for one single minute. Not that it would be hard to deceive it, it was after all just a robot. A glorified computer program.
She patted the Bot’s lukewarm, creamily muscled arm.
"Never you mind, Spikey. You go over to Buffy and I’ll talk to Andrew."
The Spikebot rose, his movements oddly stiff. He held out his hand and looked at it. It was trembling.
"Buffy?" he said. His voice sounded uncertain and wavery.
Buffy looked up sharply from her cappuccino and sloshed half of it onto the saucer in her hurry to get to Spikebot.
"Spike? Honey? What is it?" she said, her voice sharp with worry.
Buffy was such a sweetie, really. Willow was glad she could feel that way again. It had been hard to see Buffy try to be all general and stern leader, and that had made Willow forget what kind of girl Buffy really was. She vowed to herself that she wouldn't forget again. Because there was no need for that general person to surface again. She, Willow, had made the easy life possible for Buffy with her awesome benign, stress the benign, magics.
She withdrew her attention from Spike and Buffy where they stood with their bright heads close together and focused on Andrew. Andrew quailed and tried to disappear into the couch.
"Andrew. I'm disappointed in you. I thought we were friends. What drove you to try and deceive me? Weren’t we partners? Weren't we like colleagues? You could have told me about it. Don’t you think you should have?"
Andrew's eyes shot everywhere but at her face. "Tell you what?" he squeaked.
Willow bent close to his ear. "That it's really a Spikebot."
Andrew swiveled his head and looked in panic to Spike and Buffy. Buffy was oblivious, but Spike lifted his face sharply and Willow again felt the uncomfortable impact of his blue eyes.
She forced herself to look away.
"What do you mean, Willow?” Andrew said and stared at her as if she was insane. "Tell you that it's a robot? That was the deal we made, wasn’t it, to create a robot together. In what way should I have told you about that?"
Yeah. He was right. Willow shook her head. She was all discombobulated by all her suspicions and the fantasy scenarios she'd been building in her head. Andrew hadn’t double crossed her at all! They’d set out to build a robot and they had. Simple as that. Whew, she'd strayed far of the straight track there.
"You’re right, Andrew," she said, forgetting to keep her voice low. "We set out to build a Spikebot and we did."
Buffy cried out like a dying demon. "Willow, noo!"
*
Spike looked down on her, such hurt and puzzlement in his face. "Buffy? Is that right? Am I a robot?"
Buffy took his hands in hers. Was it her imagination or did they really feel stiffer and harder, less bendy?
"No, Spike, you’re not. Believe me Spike, you're you, and I love you. You’re a vampire," she swore passionately.
The look in his eyes made her hurt all over. Her skin felt tight and uncomfortable and her throat was scratchy. She’d have given her life to never see him look like that. As if everything he believed in, the fundaments of his life, had been yanked out from underneath him.
He drew his hands away and held them up. "Am I real? Am I?"
"Yes, yes, you are, you are my Spike. Don’t listen to Willow and Andrew!"
"Willow," Giles said, and Buffy had never heard him be more Ripper-like and menacing, "What have you done?"
Willow cried out in shock. "Giles! I've done nothing! I haven't said a word I shouldn’t! Buffy wanted us to pretend that he…I mean Spike, is real. Really real. Right, Spike?"
"Really real," Spike echoed a faraway look in his eyes. He turned away from Buffy and walked over to the drawn curtains. Buffy felt petrified with foreboding.
"No, Spike, don’t," she called out.
She forced herself out of her immobility and threw herself after him. But she was too late. His longer strides had carried him over to the window and he flung open the curtains with a big gesture. The bright morning sun fell down on his outstretched hands and his face and he waited patiently. Nothing happened. No smoke, no flames.
Buffy’s heart constricted painfully. Oh, Spike. She would so have spared him this.
He turned, every movement stiff and unnatural, more like Virgil from Thunderbirds than the sleek vampire he’d been a moment ago.
"Buffy, I'm not burning. The sun doesn’t harm me. Doesn’t that mean I’m not real?"
Buffy's throat hurt for real now and tears sprang from her eyes in painful little arcs. "You are real. You are my Spike and you love me.”
She embraced him but his body was stiff and hard, his hair like nylon under her fingers.
"Spike?" she said, and tried to ignore the unyielding stuff under her hands.
He didn’t answer. He stood frozen in a doll-like posture, and his plastic eyes stared sadly into nothing.
Buffy sank down, sobbing so hard she thought her ribcage would burst open and give birth to her aching lungs like a newborn alien.
*
Giles had never seen anything as heartbreaking as the Spikebot standing there stiff and mannequin-like, his robotic nature evident in every unnatural angle of his plastic hands and fake hair. Buffy cried as if she would never stop and he stooped to take her into his arms. He hadn’t been there when she'd been forced to kill Angel, and at the time he'd regretted that more than anything. Now he was glad, because he couldn’t have borne to witness her break for a second time. He had to bear it; he'd failed so terribly before, not being there when she'd needed him the most, not supporting her when she'd tried to find a way to love Spike.
"Buffy, dear Buffy, I am so terribly sorry. I blame myself. I should never have allowed Willow to harbor a misunderstanding like that. I ought to have known she'd dig on until she struck gold. Or possibly lead. I’m so sorry. I acted like a tired old man instead of as your Watcher and friend."
Willow turned to him, her sweet face sullen and guilty. His fault. He’d driven her to it by his misguided attempt to obey Buffy to the letter, instead of acting to protect her as he thought best.
"I don’t understand, Giles. What have I done? I only did what I though Buffy wanted me to. I made the Spikebot for her with Andrew, and I tried to pretend that he was real, like she wanted. And now you act like I'm the worst person ever? I don’t understand!" she cried out.
Her cry was heartfelt. And yes, within her lights she had tried to act as best she knew. How terrible to be Willow, to intend well and to act wrongly so often.
Giles lifted Buffy up to the couch, her tiny body still shaking with raw sobs. He sat down next to her and held her close. The only thing he could do for her, because though he might will it, he could never cause a second miracle for her like the one he suspected Andrew had unwittingly made.
"Willow," he started, and noticed with surprise how hoarse his own voice sounded.
Andrew was crying openly, hugging the Spikebot and saying he was sorry. Dear Andrew.
"Willow," Giles said, sounding steadier now. "I will tell you what I think happened, and Andrew can correct me when I’m wrong. Andrew made a Spikebot for Buffy. But something miraculous happened when Buffy saw the robot for the first time. I cannot say if it was a divine intervention, a miracle, magic, something built into Andrew's algorithms. Buffy believed in Spike for a moment, and that was enough to transform the simple robot into the real Spike."
"Maybe it was the Shanshu," Andrew said, choking on it.
Buffy sobbed on desperately. Giles swallowed away his own grief, determined to be there for her this time.
“Shanshu?” he said, grasping at the diversion. “I think I’ve heard of that lost prophecy. What do you know about it, Andrew?”
Willow plunked gracelessly down on the couch. “There was a miracle?”
“I think so. I have no other way to explain it.”
Andrew said, “It must have been, Willow. I just made a robot. I used the Buffybot’s algorithms and tweaked them a little.” His eyes shone with tears. “I saw it happen. And I just knew Spike would want me to say nothing about it to anyone. Because I’m his friend. A true friend honor’s a request, even after death.”
A terrible silence fell. Buffy had stopped crying and the sun shone on relentlessly on the Spikebot’s white plastic flesh. The lock snicked and everyone sat listening to the sounds of Dawn entering the house. Something thunked down on the floor. Cloth rustled. The fridge door squeaked and there was gurgling and glugging. Footsteps approached.
£
“Hey guys,” Dawn said and stopped in the middle of the room. Her eyes zeroed in on Buffy’s huddled form.
“Buffy! What’s wrong with Buffy? Spike, why aren’t you…”
The Spikebot creaked to life. Dawn could hear whirring.
“You are Dawn,” the Spikebot said with a sneer. “The monks made you into Buffy’s sister. You are not real. You hair is shiny.”
“Spike!” Dawn screamed and threw herself on the stiffly standing robot. “Spike! Where are you! Come back!”
She pounded his chest with her fists but the bot didn't seem to be able to process this.
"Are you offering violence?" it said. "Please confirm or deny."
Dawn gasped and stepped back. Her eyes swept over Giles and Buffy, and then came to rest on Willow. Her finger pointed accusingly.
"You!" Dawn said. "What have you done? Did you magic him into a robot? What happened?"
"Why does everyone point at me," Willow said, her voice quivering in indignation. "It wasn’t my fault. What are you all thinking? It's not fair! He's a robot, so what! We knew that, didn't we? I don't understand what you mean by a miracle, Giles."
Dawn stamped her foot. This was so Willow. If she wasn’t overconfident, she flipped right to the other side of the coin and turned into a puddle of insecurity. "He was real, Willow. It was really Spike and now you've gone and made him go away. What did you say?"
"Nothing!" Willow yelled, her face red and her eyes suspiciously shiny. "I just admired the hair on his arm, I said it looked real."
Dawn stared at Willow, and when nothing more explanatory was forthcoming, turned away and threw herself at Buffy’s feet. Poor Buffy. She still didn't get what exactly had been going on, but the result was painfully obvious. No more Spike, back to Spikebot.
"Buffy, don’t cry. We'll get him back. He was really here, and we will make it happen again."
Buffy didn't react. Dawn contemplated kicking her but held off for now.
"Giles. Say something."
Giles rubbed his eyes tiredly. "I don't know what to say, Dawn. In fact, I'm starting to doubt the evidence of my senses. I admit, foolish as it may seem, that I too thought for a moment that it was really Spike. But obviously I was mistaken. This is clearly a robot."
"Don't you start, Giles. You think Buffy and I are idiots? It was the really real Spike, and something she did made it go all wrong." Her finger pointed unerringly to the guilty looking Willow. "See? The guilt’s dripping off her. We all thought she was cured, but she's doing evil magics again, just like before."
"Hey, hey, Dawnie," Xander said, and Dawn started. He'd been sitting so unassumingly on the couch that she'd forgotten he was there. "Don't let's point fingers. Willow did the best she could to make Buffy happy, didn’t she? I have no idea what happened, I'm at a total loss here, call me a car wreck and tow me away, but there's no point in laying blame. Let's concentrate on how to make things better instead."
Wow. Dawn's jaw dropped. This was Xander saying this? She looked at him again. He was all manly integrity and tan and tight fitting jeans. His eyes had gotten bigger and shinier too, or maybe his face was not so puffy anymore. That was so cool. She shook her head and concentrated on Giles again.
"Giles? No need to call a Scooby meeting. We're all here. We're gonna do research and solve this problem, right?"
Giles sighed. Dawn thought of kicking him. He looked so tired and defeated. He had no right to look like that. Someone needed to take charge. It couldn’t be her, could it? She was the youngest. She looked around at the others. Xander still looked just fine, all supportive and mellow, but not like a take-chargey guy. Willow just looked mad and guilty. Andrew looked uncomfortable and shifty. Check. Buffy was a sobbing puddle, Spike a robot. Oh, God, it was going to be her. The Scoobies sure looked less heroic when you weren’t' fourteen and so eager to get in on them.
At last, Giles shifted and coughed. "Yes. Of course, Dawn, We’ll get right on it. Um, Andrew, can you…do you have some sort of documentation? On how you made the robot."
"Well, duh. I have complete systems documentation. Logs. Everything."
"Could you…would it be useful to go through them? See if there's anything in there that might explain what's happened?"
"But Giles," Andrew said, "I didn’t program the robot to become real. I don’t know how. There's nothing in there that could tell you anything about that."
"I don’t know where else to start," Giles said, but he didn’t sound very confident.
"I'll download and print it,” Andrew said and took off.
"Willow?” Giles asked, so sad and weary. "Any suggestions?"
Willow shook her head. "You mentioned something about a prophecy? Where can I read it?"
"I don't have it,” Giles said. "Wesley Wyndam-Pryce wrote about it in a letter to his father, who brought it to my attention."
"But Wesley's dead. Everyone from Angel’s team is dead."
"I know,” Giles said. "We'll just have to start searching for a prophecy like that, then."
"I could raise Wesley from the dead and ask his ghost?" Willow said.
"Willow!"
Dawn couldn't hold silent any longer. "But that is all going to take weeks! We don’t have weeks. Why don't we start with what Willow said? Maybe that was a spell? Why would Spike react to what Willow said? I talked to him, asked him if he was a robot, and nothing happened."
Andrew shrugged. "He was programmed to obey our voices, Willow’s and mine. We’re his makers."
Dawn stabbed her finger triumphantly in his direction. "See? That's the key! You said something, , and that made him alive. Willow said something thoughtless and it made him a toy again. That's the solution."
"But I don’t remember what I said!" Andrew whined. "I said lots of things to him all the time, so he could learn to process speech."
"Who cares? Start talking to him! Willow, you too. Say Nice, supportive things. Tell him he's a vampire, and a great person, and that's totally alive. Or, well, dead. You know what I mean."
Buffy rose from the ashes of broken Buffy and turned into flaming determined Buffy. She stood there, tiny, indomitable in spite of her red nose and swollen eyes. "That's right. That's what we're going to do. Start talking."
Dawn sat down, relieved. She was glad Buffy was being Buffy again. It was really hard work being her, taking charge and pushing and pulling at everyone to make them do things. It had always looked effortless, until the Potentials anyway.
₤
Willow woke up, dragged from a deep, exhausted sleep by Buffy's hard hand.
"Willow. It’s your shift."
Willow took the cup of triple strength espresso and gulped it down. She'd get heartburn if she went on like this. Buffy was remorseless, her face bleak, her jaw set. The Buffy fights the hopeless fight against the First look. They'd been talking to the Spikebot non-stop since the, um, unfortunate accident, which was in no way Willow’s responsibility, even if she had inadvertently, possibly been the trigger. If.
She trudged to the living room.
"Spike. Wonderful, beautiful, unique Spike. You are not a robot, you are a vampire. A real, live, undead but almost alive- seeming vampire. You burn in sunlight. You love Buffy. You are definitely not a mechanical, computer driven thing. You are a person. The most glorious, wonderful, important, amazing vampire in the world. A vampire with a soul, set on this earth to help Buffy and her slayers in fighting evil."
Andrew's voice kept disappearing in the middle of a word.
Willow took another swallow from her espresso and waved at Andrews. "Hi. My turn. Go get some sleep."
Andrew flapped a weak hand and stumbled up from the couch. "This is gonna kill us," he said with his destroyed remnant of a voice.
Willow sighed. "I guess we can’t force a miracle to happen. We should think about this again. It isn't working. Maybe we should pray?"
Dawn entered the room, her face as stony as Buffy’s.
"Get to work, Willow. Here's a sandwich. You can have that in half an hour."
Willow deflated. Dawn was so angry with her, as if it was her fault! As if everything was her fault, while she was the one who'd built the damn bot in the first place.
"Dawnie…"
Dawn didn’t answer and stomped out of the room.
“I’ll go get some sleep and then talk to Giles,” Andrew promised and left too, walking like an old man.
Willow finished her espresso, checked if there was enough water and started.
"Spike, most wonderful Spike, feisty vampire Spike. You should in no way take my words about your arm hair to mean that you are a robot. Because you aren’t. You are Buffy’s beloved vampire, and you will fight evil until eternity. Until death do you part, I mean. Not your death, oh no, because you are totally undead, but her death. Which I will not mention again, because it is still a long, long way of. Awesome, awesome Spike."
₤
Buffy woke up face down in her pillows. When she turned over and raked the hair out of her eyes, her face felt hot and swollen, and everything ached. Reality stomped in on its great big boots, unable to wait just a few seconds so she could regroup. The weird background noise she heard, like football commentary on the radio, was someone talking to Spike. She waited, but she didn’t feel the tiny jump of hope her heart kept making all day yesterday. There was no point; it was over. She'd had a brief taste of what happiness might have felt like and now she had to get on with life as usual. It sucked, but there you were. Life generally did.
She trundled to the bathroom and tried to reassemble the destroyed face she saw in the mirror into something her friends might recognize as Buffy. Cold compresses and eye baths were only marginally successful, and surgery wasn't really an option in the next ten minutes. She covered herself in a layer of foundation and painted on happy colors and the eye and lip contours she remembered having. There. It looked like Older Sister of Buffy, but it would have to do.
Buffy stood in the door opening of the living room and watched Willow talk to Spike. Willow had her eyes closed and was moving her upper body backward and forwards in swaying movements, if she was praying. Maybe she was. Buffy was sure the words were directed to Spike and not to the Lord, but maybe the emotion behind it wasn’t that different.
"Willow," she said, but her voice was a croak. She cleared her throat and tried again.
"Willow."
Willow looked up, tired and wary. "I'm trying, Buffy, really I am. Andrew and I have been at it non-stop for three days, and we’re ready to go on as long as you want. Because we're kind of responsible in a not completely direct but more kind of indirect way in the sense that we made the bot and…"
Buffy waved her hand. "Never mind, Will. There's no point. Just stop and go to sleep. I've been thinking about this and I just want it to end. I need to move on and accept that Spike is dead and he’s never gonna come back, okay?"
There was a flicker of something in Willow's eyes. Hope, Buffy thought, but she wasn't sure.
"We'll go on as long as you want," Willow repeated, but it sounded much firmer and more willing now, now that she knew she didn't have to.
Buffy sagged down on the couch next to Willow and looked up at the Bot, who stood contemplating the outside view with that infinitely patient look he wore lately. For a second she knew that there was something of the real Spike still in there, for how could he look with such yearning at the pale blue afternoon sky if he was just a robot? Just as quickly the knowing vanished and turned into weary resignation. Robots didn’t yearn, didn’t dream of electric sheep and weren't woken up by Blue Fairies millions of years later. Or if they did, a fat lot of good it would be to her.
She put her hand on Willow's shoulder, and her heart ached at the looks that flickered across her friend’s face. Guilt, hope, a certain wiliness. Willow was really, really bad at taking responsibility, but who was she to criticize? Not Miss Perfect by any means.
"Let's get you to bed, Will. You must be so tired."
There were actual tears in Willow’s eyes. "Thanks, Buffy," she whispered and stood up on wobbly legs.
Willow wanted to walk away but Buffy stopped her and motioned her head in the direction of Spikebot.
"Just one thing. Can you shut the bot off? I want you or Andrew to take him away and put him a box or something. I don't want to be reminded of Spike anymore."
"Sure, Buffy. Sure. Just a sec."
Willow sounded very subdued, and it was kind of an important moment all of a sudden. Willow did something to the bot in his neck, at the hairline, just the spot where she had loved to rest her hand, where his hair was softest, where he looked like a slender little boy, even if he wasn’t with all those solid muscles of his. Buffy hadn’t been aware of any sounds, but when Willow did her thing, the silence in the room had a different quality, like a fridge suddenly shutting off and leaving the room ringing with not-sound. Buffy swallowed and reached up at the staring glassy eyes, as blue as the sky outside.
"Goodbye, Spike," she whispered and gently shut his eyelids, the lashes as long as the real Spike's. Willow waited respectfully beside her until she was ready with her last lingering look at the still plastic face.
"Hey, what are you guys doing?" Andrew's voice cut across the moment like a car alarm, the kind you just want to turn off as fast as you can. "I had this great idea while I was sleeping. We should change the responses of the bot to include Buffy's voice as his control input. That would be much more in tune with the emotional make-up of the bot and…."
"Shut up, Andrew," Buffy said gently. "I know you mean well, but it’s been enough. I need to move on, and go away from here and start my life. I don’t need to have a little sliver of hope waiting for me somewhere. Take out his batteries and put him away."
"But, Buffy, I…"
"No."
Buffy left the room. She went back to her bedroom and sat on the bed. Her hands lay on her jeans, small, square brown hands with a still neat manicure. She didn’t know what they were going to do in the near and far future, but she was going to find something. No more silly dreams of vampire lovers coming magically back to life. She'd have to build her own happiness.
*
Epilogue
He lay in his box and dreamed. He dreamed of black night skies dotted with lights, of running and chasing, endlessly. He never caught anything in his dreams. He dreamed of falling into depthless pools of darkest green, falling endlessly, never hitting bottom. He dreamed of reaching out for her, as far as his arms would stretch, almost touching her, but never succeeding. He would have liked to stop dreaming. He would have liked to end, but it never happened.
Occasionally his master would take him out and test him to see if he still worked. He walked up and down the storeroom and he always worked just fine. Light shone into his box through cracks in the lid, and so he knew that days passed. If you added up the days, you had time. If you divided them into hours and minutes, you had time too. His programming forbade him to ponder these paradoxes, but he thought of them as often as he could. Time could be long and short. For a robot a second was like a million years, and also the time between two moments of light hardly existed. He liked paradoxes.
For instance, there was love. Love meant…a series of silly cartoons shot by in his head. Love was caring for her, giving her flowers once a while, boxes of chocolate. He had his own opinions on love, though. He thought it was perhaps preferring the color of her eyes above all other colors. His programming called it green, but he could see every minute fleck of their colors, because he had millions of pixels just for her eyes and he knew there was gold in there, and brown, and grey, and that her pupils were black and surrounding her eyes there was white. He had seen those whites looking pinkish, almost red, and he knew that was the color of grief.
Robots did not feel grief, but he filed away grief with time and love and hate and all the other words that had such contradictory definitions.
The Master knocked on his box, which was the signal he was going to be taken out and tested. That was politeness. This was the twelfth time he was getting tested. There had been 364 times that light had shined in his box, and 365 nights. The Master activated him and he sat up. The Master held out his hand to him. He didn’t need a hand to climb out of his box, but he took it anyway. The Master ran through his checklist, but his heart wasn’t in it, the robot could hear it in his voice. The Master had given up hope. A bell rang. The Master left the room.
The robot turned to the window and opened the blind. He dreamed of nights, but he loved the day. The warmth of the sun shone on his plastic cheeks and he held out his stiff shiny hand into a sunbeam. He wished the sun would melt him into a puddle so he would never have to lie in his box again and dream of nights and stars and endless chases.
The Master was talking to someone. The robot heard a woman's voice and thought of love and green eyes. There was an odd sensation in his hand. A thin spiral of smoke curled up in front of his eyes, obscuring a narrow strip of his view of the sunny day. The spiral thickened and his hand jerked away of its own accord. There was a scorch mark on it and he brought the finger to his mouth to lick it. It hurt. When his tongue touched the burn he stilled and thought. Of choices and ending and being forever. Finally, after a last longing look towards the heat and oblivion within his grasp, he turned away and walked towards the voice
THE END