I dunno who to trust no surprise
Everyone feels so far away from me
Heavy thought sift through the dust and the lies
Trying not to break but I’m so tired of this deceit
Every time I try to make myself get back up on my feet
All I ever think about is this
All the tiring time between
And how trying to put my trust in you just takes so much out of me

Take everything from the inside
And throw it all away
Coz I swear for the last time
I wont trust myself with you

Tension is building inside steadily
Everyone feels so far away from me
Heavy thoughts forcing their way out of me
Trying not to break but I’m so tired of this deceit
Every time I try to make myself get back up on my feet
All I ever think about is this
All the tiring time between
And how trying to put my trust in you just takes so much out of me

Take everything from the inside
And throw it all away
Coz I swear for the last time
I wont trust myself with you

I wont waste my self on you
You
You
You
Waste my self on you
You
You
You

I’ll
Take everything from the inside
And throw it all away
Coz I swear for the last time
I wont trust myself with you

Everything from the inside
And throw it all away
Coz I swear for the last time
I wont trust myself with you
You
You

**

It was their biggest problem. The girl couldn’t trust him, Spike knew it, Xander knew it, Willow, the girl’s best friend, knew it. Then again, he also knew that she had absolutely no reason to trust him at all, and that lack of trust was the be all and end all of the friendship. Yet, another thing he knew was that it wasn’t just him that Buffy refused to trust. It was everybody. Ever since her dad had left two years previously, she had been the most paranoid person anybody ever had the unfortunate chance to meet.

Buffy’s father, Hank Summers, from whom she took her second name when she was born (her parents still being married when they wrote on her birth certificate), had left their home when she was 15 on the day of August 16th, leaving her, her mother, Joyce - a most lovely lady whom every one of her and her daughters’ friends adored - and Buffy’s ‘bratty kid sister’, as the elder would describe her, Dawn - who, like her mother, was actually a very nice and beautiful young lady – to fend for themselves.
Dawn had inherited her mother’s facial features, but not her curly hair. Instead it was brown and sleek with a shiny tone to it that gave a hairdressers finish. It was actually much the same as Buffy’s if the elder sister hadn’t insisted on dyeing it Barbie blonde, leaving her subject to many ‘dumb blonde’ jokes, especially from Spike when she lived up to the title, including the numerous times she forgot her history homework (a class she continued to bunk for fear that she would turn into an intellectual like her mothers good friend, Rupert Giles, father to the ever annoying William, or Spike as he had named himself).

It was this abuse of her trust that had changed Buffy’s attitude towards her father enormously. At the very beginning, she had tried, in spite, changing her name from Buffy, the name her father had given her when she was younger, to Lizzie, another version of her full name, Elizabeth. However, this plan had failed miserably as too many people had become accustomed to calling Elizabeth by the nickname her father had appointed her with at the park, swinging across the monkey bars on a hot and sticky summers day, desperately trying to swing faster so that she wouldn’t burn her 7 year old hands.

This failure to change the name made the 15-year-old even more determined to change other things about herself. She became everything her father had hated. She changed her hair, she changed her clothes, she hung around with people less desirable, in other words, Spike. Spike was the notorious ‘bad boy’ in school with spiked bleach blonde hair, all black clothes, an old black Desoto and the disgusting habit that was smoking. Although William Giles’ father was her mother and father’s good friend, it did not mean that Hank had to like Rupert’s son, which he allowed everyone to know, opening (though not bluntly) announcing his dislike for the then 15-year-old. It was because of this dislike that Buffy made a reluctant friendship with the bleached-brain menace. Her father had promptly called upon hearing this news demanding to know whether she was ‘hanging around with the cockroach of a boy’. Her father always had been good with his words.
The friendship had slowly developed, Buffy and Spike sparring verbally everyday, Xander and Willow, Buffy’s best friends, all egging the young woman on, yet they all knew that it was Buffy’s version of sanity, stopping her from crying constantly. Xander, the brown-haired ‘clown of the class’, a title he formally received later on at junior prom, constantly tried to cheer up Buffy with his silly acts and jokes, constantly cracking himself up (occasionally also Willow and Spike) but only ever managed to draw a tight lipped smile from Buffy. Willow, Buffy’s red-headed ‘geeky’ friend, head of the class, was there to support her throughout the whole ordeal, and continued through until the present day, but never really managed to get the blonde to open up.

Eventually it was Spike who got Buffy to cry. For a whole year she had bottled up all of her emotions concerning the to-do. Even when her father had left initially, she had refused to cry, getting caught up in doing what her father didn’t want her to do, being what he didn’t want to be (he had always wanted his ‘little angel’ successful, beautiful and polite. She aimed to skive off as many lessons as possible, be sexy, rather than beautiful, and as a rebel was rarely polite to people, with the exception of her mother, generally being a ‘little devil’, rather than the heavenly version she used to be, the version her father had envisioned she would always be). She would lie in her bed at night, and rather than think about what had happened, she would plug in her headphones and listen to the heavy punk that Spike had introduced her to (rather than the light pop that she used to love) and scowl until her eyes would close and she would fall into a deep sleep, where she didn’t have to concentrate on not thinking, it would just happen automatically, and she was always glad for the reprieve.

It was one summer’s afternoon, only a small space of time from the anniversary of her father’s leaving that Buffy finally let everything go. Joyce had invited Rupert and his son round for Sunday lunch. They had finished the meal and left the table to sit in the living room when there was an unexpected knock on the door. It was Buffy who opened the door, only to find her father standing behind the wood, a sheepish expression on his face.

“Bugger this,” she had said initially (a word that she had picked up from Spike as he used it so often), beginning to shut the door in his face before she realised that she couldn’t. Hank had already managed to get his pristinely shoed foot in the door, his elder male arms holding the door open.

“I want to talk to you Buffy. William said to come round today.” Hank had never liked Spike’s nickname. From the very beginning, when Rupert and he had come to Sunnydale from England, living down Henlow Drive, the next road over from Revello, he had refused to call the bleached blonde by his chosen name, and obviously, he was sticking to that, even then. “He said it would be a good time-” Buffy, by then, was fuming, seriously angry with her male partner in crime. She held out a hand to stop her fathers talking, afraid that her mother and sister would hear. She planned that they never find out that he was here. When he stopped talking, she smiled sweetly, popping down her thumb and three fingers.

“One, what the hell do you think you’re doing here, you have no right!” When it looked as if her father would start talking, she gave him a look that said ‘don’t you bloody dare’ and he shut up immediately. A second finger popped up “Two, his name is Spike, not William. It has been for years, and you, again, have absolutely no right to look down on him for his choice, even if it may be a little odd.” A third and final finger appeared. “Three. Your time is up. Leave now.” That was when she closed the door in his astonished face.

Buffy had stormed into the living room, demanding the location on the bleach blonde who had set her up, before locating him on the back porch, giving him a well earned smack on the face. Another verbal fight ensued, Spike giving the excuse that she had to face him, let her anger out (although he had heard that she had not really unleashed her anger, having hid around the wall of the house, listening to the exchange, and she had not raised her voice once, at best sounding a little anguished – although he was glad that she had defended his title, he really hated the name William) and that seeing him would allow her to let it out, let out all her anguish about it. No teenage girl could survive through her parents divorce without crying at least once (he knew that some need not cry more than once as they worked through their pain in other ways), but he insisted. Buffy was adamant that she was fine, that she had been ever since the divorce. It was always her excuse that she didn’t talk, not because she was upset and bottling things up, but because she didn’t want to. Spike had always described her as a ‘stubborn bint’ (a British term that no-one but his dad understood, although she had certainly lived up to the stubborn part of it that night). It had eventually broken down into a screaming and beating match, where Buffy would pound pointlessly on his chest, breaking down and sobbing clutching to Spike’s shirt, although he really didn’t mind that she soaked his favourite t-shirt. She had finally let go and cried her heart out, a period that lasted about 10 minutes, going from loud sobs, to silent tears, to hiccups and back again. It had ended up with her being seriously dehydrated. Besides, he had never understood why it was his favourite shirt. It was exactly the same as all his others (Buffy had teased him about this countless time, constantly insisting on him wearing colour, which he eventually appeased, buying a red shirt to wear over his black attire).

Needless to say, Joyce, Dawn and Rupert found out about Hank’s impromptu visit, but he was long gone by the time they reached the door, the only trace left of his presence the skid marks on the road where he had left in haste, driving his pretty silver Ferrari out of Sunnydale and back off to wherever he had been for the past year.

It was also needless to say that although Buffy finally became herself again after that day, still staying friends with Spike and his friends from before they mad their truce (Angel, captain of the soccer team (though defiantly not the usual football captain that you saw in movies), Drusilla, Spike’s slightly insane ex-girlfriend with dark, almost black eyes that could hypnotise a stranger at first glance, Riley, a rather normal bloke that most girls would kill to get one date with, and Darla, Angel’s marvellously naturally blonde girlfriend), Buffy refused to trust Spike at all, feeling more than a little betrayed. Two summers in a row she had been betrayed by a main man in her life, and she wasn’t pleased about it. And this mistrust carried on, Buffy having to go through one of the others if Spike tried to tell her something, fearing that he was deceiving her, and this paranoia slowly got to all her friends, especially to Spike, until, after a year, in September of their Senior year, it all came fruition. All the built up frustration that both Spike and Buffy felt, Buffy from hating not being able to trust Spike, Spike from not being trusted by Buffy, came bursting to the surface in the greatest confrontation Sunnydale High, the only High School in Sunnydale, the ‘Happy little town’ 3 hours from LA, would ever see.

Usually Willow would be annoyed. Every time Spike told Buffy anything of importance, the blonde would ask the redhead for verification. It was always ‘Are we really Bronzing tonight?’ or ‘Did Riley really do this?’ and it was really beginning to grate on the computer nerds nerves. However, this time, Willow could understand why Buffy was reluctant to believe Spike – She would have been too, the news was so dire.

Spike had been out the week before and had spotted Buffy’s boyfriend of four months ‘snogging’ a brunette who went unnamed because Spike was too busy getting into Parker’s face and asking him what the hell he was doing, making the brunette troll of a teenager cower in his polished shoes. The bleached-blonde had been unable to tell Buffy what had happened until the first day of school as she had been on a trip with Joyce and Dawn to New York for the last two weeks of the summer holiday. He hadn’t wasted anymore time on pulling her away from Xander and Willow, knowing that this wasn’t information that one pussy-footed around telling a person, especially Buffy, as the longer you waited, the worse the reaction would become. He knew that she wouldn’t believe him, but he had expected an explosion rather than the quiet simmering of anger and denial beneath the surface of her hazel eyes that he actually received in response to his declaration of Parker’s unfaithfulness.

“You’re lying,” Buffy said in the quietest, yet most menacing, tone of voice anyone who knew her had ever heard her use, including her little sister who was subject to constant threats. Spike, however, was unfazed and just shook his head and looked at her, every one of his facial features saying how sorry he was that he had to be the bearer of such horrible news.

“Why would I lie about something like this?” Spike knew exactly how untrusting Buffy was of men, especially him because of the incident of the previous summer, and he really didn’t need Buffy questioning him any more than she already did. He always told the truth, hoping that one day she’d finally realise that he’d never actually lied to her in the entire time that the two had known each other. Of course, Buffy never had, and she was adamant that Spike was out to hurt her like the summer before. It had never once occurred to her that him calling her father had been exactly what she had needed.

“Because you live to torture and hurt me maybe?” Buffy always clung to the fact that she and Spike had been each other’s nemesis before they had formed a friendship, just so that she could have an excuse to mistrust him. She would never admit that it was the worst excuse in the book, as the sparring that had gone on was never meant to severely hurt the other’s feelings, and was instead just a playful taunting to relieve the boredom that was school.

“You know I’d never lie about something so major.” Spike scowled as his mouth opened and continued to work without consulting his brain first. “In fact, you know I’d never lie to you at all. Every time that you’ve questioned Willow on something I’ve said, she’s verified it. I don’t understand why you bloody well insist on thinking I’m deceiving you every bloody time we speak, and to be perfectly honest, it’s beginning to get on my ruddy nerves and all.” Buffy simply looked at him like he was a complete and utter moron.

“You want to know why I don’t trust you?” Buffy took a step forwards, raking her eyes over his form with a look of disgust (which wasn’t due to his clothing choice of leather duster, black jeans and t-shirt, a red shirt and heavy Doc Martins, as she had often defended his fashion sense) before looking back to his face. “Fine, I’ll tell you, Spike. I don’t trust you because you snuck around my house when my mother, my sister and I were busy, got my dads phone number – which, by the way, was tucked at the bottom of my underwear drawer - called him and invited him round. O, and you did all this without consulting one single other soul about it. And I would be completely not surprised if you didn’t think at all about how I would feel about you inviting my father around, whether it did me good or not. And, for that matter, how my mother and sister would feel about my father being there uninvited and all. That is why I don’t trust you, Spike.” Spike shook his head and stepped forwards towards her, getting even closer.

“But I never once lied to you. Not once. I simply didn’t tell you. And you just admitted that it did you good!” Spike sighed and looked at Buffy imploringly, willing her to listen to him. “I swear to you, Buffy, I’m telling you the truth. I wouldn’t lie to you about this. I know how much it’d hurt you feelings. You’re going to feel like you’ve been betrayed by yet another guy and-“ Buffy held a hand up to stop Spike, angry fire in her eyes.

“You know nothing about how I feel, Spike.” Buffy spat his name with so much venom that Spike almost flinched but he managed to stand his ground. In fact, he stepped even closer to her, black leather duster swaying around his ankles as he got right up into her face.

“Bull. I know you, Buffy Summers. Better than anyone else. I could finish your sentences if I bloody well wanted to. I could read your mind and know exactly which food you’re craving.” Buffy swallowed a little. These were both true. Even before they were friends, when they were still ‘mortal enemies’, he’d been able to finish her sentence, finish her insults. And when they became friends, and she would call him feeling down (about something other than her father), he would often randomly come out with ‘Bet you’re craving strawberries right now’ or ‘Bet you want some Phish Food right about now’, and it would always be exactly what she did want. Spike had only moved to Sunnydale 4 years before her dad had left, and yet he knew her better than Willow or Xander did, and they had been her best friends since kindergarten. “Don’t tell me that I don’t know how you feel. I got you to cry last summer. Not willow, not Xander. And hell, you might have forgiven them for calling your father. But no. You got stuck with having to deal with the implications of me instead.”

Buffy knew that he was right; she would have forgiven Willow or Xander for calling her father. Spike… he made her want to be angry with him just because he existed. However, just because he was right, didn’t mean that she was going to give up the fight. But neither did this stubbornness and refusal to give up her side of the argument meant that she wasn’t beginning to feel more than a little uncomfortable with the close proximity of his face and her lack of personal space, so she stepped back one space, a move that was responded to with a raised eyebrow from Spike. Buffy simply glared back at him.

“Just because you knew that I needed to cry, and what would make me cry, does not mean that you know how I was feeling, Spike. I could have been angry, sad, jealous, any number of feelings." Spike’s retaliation was instantaneous.

“You felt betrayed, Buffy. Betrayed, lonely and unloved. You had always been Hank’s favourite, and when he suddenly didn’t care anymore, you thought that it was your fault.” Buffy went to bite her lip, but she thought better of it at the last moment. Any outward sign of him having had effected her would be her downfall. The trouble was, Spike was scarily accurate in his interpretation, and the petite blonde didn’t like it one bit. Course, she knew that he had known why she had been so upset, and it had always concerned her, which was why she kept her distance. She didn’t like the thought of any man understanding her (other than Xander, but Xander didn’t understand anyone, so that was never going to happen anyway), and Spike understanding her was the worst thing that could have happened. However, now that he had said it out loud, there was no escaping him, or it. Didn’t mean that she wasn’t going to try though.

“You don’t know anything, Spike, and I don’t need to listen to this.” Buffy started to turn away, but Spike grabbed her arm in a tight hold and swung her back round to face him. He was finally in the mood for a confrontation and he was going to have it, whether Buffy wanted one or not.

“Yes, you do. Everyone’s fed up of your attitude, Buffy. I’m fed up with the fact that you won’t, not can’t, won’t trust me, even though what I did was good for you. Everyone else is fed up of telling you things that I’ve already told you, because if you would just trust me, they needn’t waste their breath." Spike took a deep, shaky breath before sighing and looking down at the floor. He was going to have this out, even if it completely ruined their already precarious friendship. He looked back up into Buffy’s slightly startled face, loosening his tight grip on her arm a little bit. “I’m fed up of not being able to hug you in the mornings when I see you, like I used to, just because you don’t want to be touched. I’m fed up of not having our chats on the phone when you feel like crap. I’m fed up of not coming to your house after school on a Thursday to drink hot chocolate with those mini marshmallows in it while you blabber on about some cute guy or really annoying girl.” It went unspoken that this was usually Cordelia Chase, head cheerleader. “I’m fed up of watching that wanker, Parker, use and abuse you while he’s shagging some other bird behind your back, because you could do so much better than that arse. I’m fed up of caring for someone who refuses to give me the time of day anymore.” Spike swallowed as he lifted his left hand and ran his fingers through her shoulder length blonde hair, hand shaking a little as he watched it, finally saying, in a quiet, reflective tone, “Why can’t you forgive me for caring, Buffy?”

When Spike looked back at her face, all he could see in her eyes was fear and surprise, and it hurt. Of course, he understood the surprise as everyone had always assumed that his feelings stopped at friendship, but from his declaration it was going to be glaringly obvious that it went a lot deeper than that.

What happened next, though, was something that nobody had expected, not even Spike, no matter how well he knew her. Buffy’s eyes began to water, and as she blinked them away, she lifted her hands and pushed against Spike’s chest, catching him by surprise and making him release his hold on her arm, before she turned and fled in the opposite direction, as if all the hounds of hell were on her heels. Spike watched her disappear, still a little startled, before he shook his head to clear it, growled and turned, storming off in the opposite direction.

The usual noise that normally gave the central quad a buzz instantly returned as the small crown that had gathered in anticipation of the usual fight began to dissipate as the drama they had received instead ended, whilst Willow and Xander, who had sat on the sidelines on their usual bench (Willow sat properly while Xander perched on the back) simply looked at each other, Willow’s bottom lip red from where she had been nervously biting it – unlike Buffy – before they stood, grabbing their backpacks, Willow tucking her curly, shoulder length red hair behind her ear as she dashed off to find Buffy, with Xander heading in the opposite direction to find Spike.