Chapter 1
There’s another world inside of me
That you may never see
There are secrets in this life that I can’t hide…
“Weak. That’s the word. No Hercules here, Achilles has a scorpion in his foot…”
Buffy stood there silently, tears welling up in her eyes as she watched her once-strong, would-be paramour battle himself with words, none of them making any sense to her.
“Got to find the spark, get the fire started. Got to start the fire, Make the girl warm. Too many buggers want the heat… NO! You get away from there! It’s not your turn!” He scolded the air angrily, then, after casting Buffy a heart-wrenching look, put his hands on either side of his head and cried. “Got to have a pass to go there. Take a ticket, stand in line. Mustn’t blow out the spark…”
By now, since their encounter at the church, Buffy knew what Spike meant by “spark”… his soul. A tear slipped unbidden down her cheek as she closed her eyes and mourned for him. Suddenly, she felt his cool hand cupping her face, wiping the errant tear away with the pad of his thumb.
“Shh, pet,” he crooned, during this rare moment of mental clarity. “Don’t cry, you’re strong. Always were. Till I went and got my bloody heel poked.”
Her brows knit together as she tried to determine whether or not he had slipped again, when she remembered his earlier ramblings about Achilles. She forced herself to form a wavering smile. “Leave it to you to go all Greek warrior on me.”
He lowered his eyes, as if meeting her gaze was a privilege he didn’t deserve. “Did I frighten you? A couple of weeks ago, at the church. Did I…” his gaze flickered up to hers briefly, “hurt you?”
Her words caught in her throat momentarily. “Spike, I don’t know how to react. How to feel.” She covered his hand, still on her cheek, with her own. “I don’t know how to bury the hurt from our past, but I so want to take all of the hurt you’re going through and bury it, too.”
His eyes snapped up to hers in surprise. It was the first thing she’d said to him that was even close to loving. “You’d have to bury me, love,” he murmured. “It’s too much a part of me to remove.” He continued stroking her cheekbone with his thumb, staring at her as if committing her beauty to memory.
She noticed his scrutiny and squeezed his hand. “Spike, don’t.”
Chastised, he dropped his eyes to the floor of the basement between them and tried to pull his hand from her grasp. “Right. Sorry. Mustn’t. No… wasn’t my turn…”
She could feel she was losing him again, so with her other hand she took his chin and gently guided it so he was looking at her again. “No, Spike… Don’t look at me as if you’ll never see me again.”
His lips quivered and for a moment she was afraid he would break into sobs. But he surprised her by throwing his head back and laughing. Not an evil laugh, or a sarcastic laugh, but a belly laugh, as if what she had said was delightfully funny. After a moment, however, irony colored his humor and he stared her in the eyes. “But, that’s how I’ve always looked at you, pet… well, when I wasn’t looking at you like you’d lost your damn mind. But then, I seem to have ever-so-slightly misplaced my own, so…” He trailed off and studied her, lost in memories. Finally, he breathed softly, “No… whenever I had the chance, I would study every movement, every curve, every feature. The way you talked, the way you looked, the way you looked at me, in those rare moments that you weren’t hating my existence.” During his pause, he saw her wince slightly and smiled a bit. “I never knew if the moment I had to look at you would be the last. I never knew from one meeting to the next whether you would decide after you were through that we were through… So, I always took the opportunity to notice everything about you.” He looked her deeply in the eyes. “You never realized I was doing it because you didn’t want to.”
Somewhere in this darkness
There’s a light that I can’t find…
Maybe it’s too far away,
Or maybe I’m just blind… Maybe I’m just blind…
Buffy blinked as the truth of his words stung her. She hadn’t wanted to notice what he was doing. It would have placed an element of something deeper than meaningless sex into the scenario between them. She looked at him, stroking the hand that was stroking her face. “Spike…” she sighed, “I’m so sorry… I was a bitch.”
He blinked and, with complete innocent candor that only the mentally deranged can muster, said, “You know, I’ve heard that about you…”
She giggled softly under her breath, in self-deprecation. “Yeah, I guess you have…” She reached up with her other hand to touch the soft blond curls at his forehead, smiling as she thought how much better he looked with his hair like this.
The look in his eyes was heartbreaking. He was like a beaten puppy that didn’t know what to make of the drop of affection he was suddenly receiving. He pulled away from her touch, wrapping his arms around himself and started pacing the floor. “No ticket. No stamp. No entry…”
Buffy sighed, casting her eyes down to the floor where he was pacing. Things had been going so well… she had seemed to be reaching him, and she had felt… something… “Spike,” she began softly.
“No. Nononono… William is a bad man!”
“Spike,” she said again, when he quieted a bit, “I never got the chance to thank you for your help the other night. With Cassie…”
He stopped pacing and stared off into space ahead of him. “She’ll tell you…”
“What?” Buffy looked at him, confused.
His gaze met hers and she could have sworn she saw a spark of love there, what he hadn’t managed to tamp down. “Someday, she’ll tell you…”
Suddenly, Buffy knew those words had come from Cassie. That Cassie had spoken to Spike before she died. About her. It made the words that Cassie had said to her right before her death, about her making a difference, more significant.
You will…
Deep inside of her, something made a decision. She moved over to him gently and took his hands in hers, pulling him to face her. His eyes showed her nothing but confusion and puzzlement at her actions. My God, she thought, Did I really treat him that badly? She reached up again to stroke the side of his face with the backs of her fingers. “Spike, get your things. You’re coming home.”
He was silent for a moment, then a single tear slid from the corner of his eye down the side of his face. He looked at her with pure vulnerability. “H-home?”
The elation and terror that warred in that word almost killed her.
