Part 9
Rupert Giles had done a lot of things in his life. But staring into the cold eyes of the woman he considered his daughter, and trying to lie to her was among the hardest. The hardest was trying to do so again when his daughter in every way but blood caught him in the lie. “Buffy I…I don’t know if you are ready to hear this.”
Buffy began laughing hysterically. “Buffy what is so funny?”
“Giles…I have seen heaven, hell, and all that lies between. Just what could you possibly say that I could not handle. So don’t patronize me! If there is a decision to make in my life, I will make it. Not you. So tell me right now, what is going on?” Buffy’s words had started soft, but her voice had ended hard. Anger and a burning rage erupted behind the eyes of the eldest slayer like the fire of the sun.
“I sent Xander and Willow on a mission to Chicago.”
“Why?”
“To see if a rumor was true. To see if…To see if Spike had some how survived the fight in L.A.”
“You…You You kept this from me? How could you keep this from me?”
“Buffy you have been in a great deal of pain. If we brought this to you, and it wasn’t true, you would have been crushed.”
“You had no right.”
“I had every right to try and make sure that you did not go through unnecessary pain. That the idea that you had left Spike again…There are many things you can justly be angry at me for Buffy, but this is not one of them.”
“Alright, then tell me right now. Is Spike alive? Answer me Giles, IS SPIKE ALIVE!”
“Yes, but I don’t know if for much longer.”
----
Willow stared at Xander. He had not moved from his place beside Spike’s bed since they had moved him onto the plane. Willow stood up and went to his side. Hoping she could see whatever it was that he saw, or see whatever it was her friend was trying to do.
“Don’t say it Will.”
“Say what?”
“That this is pointless. That Spike might never make it back.”
“I wasn’t.”
“But you were thinking it. I know because I am too. I don’t want to. I so desperately don’t want to. I want to bring him back to Buffy because I would have done anything if someone could bring Anya back to me. But I think in doing that we may have done what no one else seems to have been able to do. We might be the one’s that kill Spike, and Buffy will never forgive us.”
“Xander, don’t you dare think like that. Spike has survived more then anyone could image, and he did it alone. Now we are here to help him. He is not going to die. Spike never gives up.” Willow said the words, but she couldn’t make them have the conviction that Xander or her needed.
She had seen Spike’s body. The endless stream of bruises that seemed to…Willow had never believed it possible for someone to give up on hope. The belief that they could be forgiven, but looking at the broke body of Spike she know believed she had. Whatever had broken Spike’s will to such a point she didn’t know, and she was afraid of finding out.
----
Buffy had run from Giles office. She didn’t care what anyone thought. She ran out into the daylight, ran as far from the council headquarters as she could before the contents of her stomach would no longer be contained in her body. Spike was alive. That was all that had registered in her mind for a long time, but then she heard him. She heard Giles talk about how Spike might not make it back to England.
Buffy wanted to cry, but her body would shed no tears. Her grief so overpowering that it would not let her cry.
You won’t die on me Spike. I won’t let you die. I won’t lose you , I won’t let you go, I won’t let you not believe that I love you.
----
Spike felt the coldness of the concrete against his knees using anything to focus against the pain of what had just happened to him. Those words, why those words! Of anything Buffy could have said, why that? “You’re beneath me.” Those words had haunted him for a century, the words that had turned a poet into killer. Now cut that killer as harsh as they had the poet, and all he could do was cry in pain.
Then for a second he was back in front of Cecily as the others laughed, and then he seemed to flicker back and forth between the two sides of his life. Those words repeating over and over again interspaced by the mocking laughter of long dead voices. And for one brief second both demon and man screamed in shared pain.
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