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A/N - Sorry really isn't going to cut it is it? I know i haven't updated for eons. I have an impressive list of excuses, but I won't bore you with them. I will however pledge to try and do better in the future.

Thanks as always to April who unlike me can actually turn a chapter around in a reasonable amount of time.

Anyway. I'm sorry for the delay and grovel humbly at all your feet.

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She had hoped that he'd come and join her in the basement sometime in those twilight hours when her world and his overlapped and light blossoming on the horizon played hide and seek with the shadows of the retreating night. He hadn't come, and when she'd risen with the sun and trudged wearily into the kitchen with sleep-filled eyes and matted hair, there had only been Angel, reading over the scribbled notes he asked her to give to Giles.

And Angel looked awful, tired and mournful, with his pained eyes and vacant sadness. She didn't know what had happened to extinguish those last sparks of joy in him that had never burned all that bright. She didn't ask. It felt like it was none of her business and that in itself was strange enough to warrant a little thought. True, she still felt a love for him that transcended affection, but standing in front of him then while they talked of anything but the damage so obvious on each of them, her heart beat slow and steady. Her chest ached for him, for the hurt they didn't talk about, but the crazed butterflies in her gut that had once accompanied his very presence lay dormant, or perhaps extinct, in her belly. So she cut the conversation short and he looked relieved.

She didn't see Spike till later, and by then the day was well underway and there'd been so much to do. Giles and Willow had led the scoobies in researching and she'd had to train with the girls as usual just to keep their minds off what had happened the night before. And the wounded had needed her care, and thank God Faith's slayer healing had her up on her feet and able to help. So she hadn't even caught sight of him till much later when the sun had just dropped low enough for him to smoke in the shadows on the back porch. Dawn had been with him; she'd heard their murmured voices and strained to hear the words as she watched them from the kitchen window.

"So you're back for good?" Dawn sounded so young, so hopeful and uncertain, that Buffy had to smile. Her sister was such a little girl at some times, and at others, such a woman.

"As long as Buffy needs me. Reckon till after the apocalypse," he answered distractedly as he leaned awkwardly back to tug at a crumpled pack of cigarettes snared in the too-tight front pocket of his jeans.

"You think she'll send you away afterwards?"

"She'd have plenty of reason to." He gave up on the cigarettes and turned to the teenager with a soft, resigned sigh.

"I don’t want you to go." So simply put, and she couldn't help but wish she had even half her sister’s frankness.

"I'd stay if I could, pet. You know that." his hand came up and hovered undecided in the air for a moment before he brushed it once over her hair. "But if Buffy wants me gone…"

"Man, you don't get any less whipped, do you?" She tossed her hair, all dismissive teenage condescension. "You don't even have a soul or a chip to blame, and you’re still like her doormat."

"Am not." His voice was childishly affronted, and she couldn’t help but smile; he was more kid than Dawn was most of the time. How did he hold onto that? With everything he'd seen and all the unforgivable things he'd done, how could he still be so very young?

"Are too. You'd do anything she said, like she's all that."

"She is all that." And with that unequivocal statement, Buffy found herself biting her lip to keep from grinning.

"Says you. But you’re a complete freak anyway." Only Dawn could speak to him like that and get away with it. "I mean, a vamp who hangs out with humans. How lame is that?"

"Here speaks the teenage toddler." He leant back to look at her, showing Buffy his amused profile, illuminated in the porch light. "I may be unconventional, but least if I spring a leak wrong time wrong place, it’s not the end of the bloody world."

Buffy envied him then. She'd been trying so hard with Dawn and getting nowhere and they'd never talked about this, about the fact Dawn was still what she was whether Glory was chasing her or not. And then, seeing them laughing about it, teasing and joking, she realised she'd done it all wrong. All Dawn had wanted was to understand the truth about herself, but Buffy had made it too difficult: don't ask don't tell, and lock it away like the freak in the attic. Her own sister's origins, a shameful taboo.

Just another thing to regret, she supposed, going into the battle of her life. Oh sure, she'd faced some pretty scary stuff, but this? This was a different league of bad, and she could feel the regrets piling up against the dam of her heart. But there was one thing she was determined she wouldn't need to regret, so she waited till Spike finally freed his smokes and lit up. She watched Dawn make a theatre of coughing and waving away the smoke as she head back into the house with a good humoured, "Since you don't care about my lungs, I'm going to help Giles." Then she slipped out to stand next to him as he contemplated the darkening sky and forced nicotine laced smoke in and out of his redundant lungs.

"So, how's it going in there?" His voice wafted across the warm silence of the evening, accompanied by a blue-grey cloud that tickled her throat when she pulled in air and turned her sigh into a little cough.

"Sorry." He waved ineffectually at the smoke, cigarette dangling unsupported from his lips.

“Spike." Her tone must have alerted him to her seriousness, because his hand fell suddenly away and everything about him became in an instant so subtly, glaringly, different. She read him easily, saw him bring the shutters down, man the barricades, prepare for incoming heartbreak. "About yesterday at the vineyard… You know, you and me, with the kissing and everything."

"Yeah?" He was wary, eyes watchful and guarded, body tensed for flight.

"I just wanted to know if we're cool."

"We're cool." Oh so very cool. Almost cold in his self preservation, and that wouldn’t do, not on that night of all nights.

"Good. I, er, didn't want you to think…" She'd never been very good at this, and he'd never made it any easier.

"I didn't think anything, okay, slayer?" His voice was resigned, hollow. Not so long ago, before he’d proved her right on the bathroom floor, and wrong in a God-forsaken cave in Africa, he would have treated that single fleeting kiss like state’s evidence, proof positive of denied affection, but things had changed since those screwed up days and he'd given up on ever winning the jury over. "You were just feeling a bit low, missing your mates and what all. Don’t you fret now; just forget about it." He waved a dismissive hand, and if she didn’t know so much better she'd think he really wasn't bothered.

"That's not…" Shit, it was hard. Hard to talk to him when kissing him was easier and punching him even easier again. Perhaps if Angel hadn’t interrupted them, she'd have been able to do it, get carried along in the moment and just for once be honest with him. "It's just… I don’t want to forget it, okay? I don’t know what it means and now is really not the time to be analysing anything. But when everyone let me down, you were the one who came through for me, and that wasn’t really a big surprise, because that’s what you do, what you've been doing all along. I can't promise you that--"

"Buffy." His fingers found her lips, gently restraining the outpouring of sound. "You don’t have to promise me anything. Just let me help you. For once, Buffy, just let me help you."

His touch felt like camomile on her roughened lips, and his eyes plead with her to trust him just this once, to let him love her. His fascinating eyes—she loved the way they changed, soulful topaz and icy blue. They'd given him away when he'd come back to her playing the part of William, and they gave him away now. Love, the same unerring love that she'd clung to and feared in equal measure since death had turned to life and everything had gone to hell. Just love; soul come, soul go, but his love endured. She could spend forever chasing her tail with “how” and “why,” but now, in the face of what might actually be the end of the world this time, how and why didn't seem to matter.

Her lips found his with an urgency that for once was borne out of something other than desperation, and when his arms came around her to pull her flush against his body, she couldn't remember why it had once seemed so important.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

"Bugger." Giles titled his head in agreement. Spike's response did, after all, seem to be a fair assessment of the situation. No one else spoke, each one busy with his or her own thoughts. "Bugger!" the vampire repeated more vehemently.

"Oh yeah." Buffy sighed and leant back in her chair, one delicate hand coming up to massage the growing pressure in her temples. She couldn't do this. It was worse somehow now, as if the extinguishing of the tiny light of hope the scythe had cast over them now made the darkness blacker than before. His hand found hers, a subtle hidden gesture, fingers, obscured from view by the dining room table, brushing their support gently over the back of her hand.

She turned her hand palm up and let her fingers tangle with his until she had his large hand snared in her smaller one. "Okay, Giles. Recap."

With a drawn out intake of breath, the watcher replaced the glasses he'd thrown carelessly to one side and began again. "According to this manuscript," he said, waving vaguely at the book stolen the previous night from Caleb's lair, "the two scythes are the twin weapons of the chosen. One for the warrior of light--"

"Me." Buffy interjected. "Or the slayer, at least." She cast an apologetic glance at where Faith leaned heavily against the far wall, one hand clutched against her wounded abdomen. "You feel it, too, right? How it's ours?"

"Works both ways, though, pet." Spike's voice caught her attention away from the dark slayer's nod and she turned towards him. Sitting side by side as they were, the action brought her face within inches of his and she drew back a little, flustered by the closeness. "When I held it, it called to me. It’s still calling." He glanced over at Angel and the older vampire nodded.

"It promises power," Angel confirmed with a grim nod. "It's calling to the demon in me."

"Nah, mate," Spike corrected. "To the bad in you, in anyone. You and me just got a bigger loadstone is all. But I reckon anyone on the dark side, human and demon alike, can feel it."

"So why are the good people of Sunnydale fleeing in droves?" Dawn asked. "Why isn't our scythe calling to them?"

"Human's aren't very sensitive," Anya informed them with all the blasé authority of a millennia of existence. "They probably wouldn't recognise it even if they could feel it. Unless they're a slayer or a Wicca or something. I think we can safely rule out the possibility of an avenging army of good riding to our rescue."

"Which explains, but doesn't help." Buffy tried to steer the conversation back to battle planning. "So Caleb can use his scythe to rally up a army of evil. What can we use ours to do?"

She felt his hand flutter slightly in her own like a small animal trying to escape the trap of her grip. She looked up and instantly saw the reason. Giles was making his way around to their side of the table; in just a moment, he would be able to see their joined hands, and he was trying to spare her. To keep her secrets as always.

She locked eyes with him and slowly, very deliberately, brought their linked hands up to rest on the tabletop. Then she turned to Giles and asked in an even voice, as if her heart wasn't hammering wildly in her chest. "What you got?"

"Great leadership strategy, Buff." She should have known it would be Xander. "Looks like when the going gets tough, the tough get groiny with the evil dead. Next time he gets a beeper from the scythe of evil he'll be able to take a few of us out. Say, how many girls will you let him chew through before you do something about it?" She felt Spike go completely still beside her, felt his fear and uncertainty tingling through her palm. She'd made the move. Now she had to follow through, for Spike's sake if not for her own, but she just didn't know how, how to fight at this of all times with the very people she needed to be drawing close.

"Now is not the time Xander." Giles came to her rescue, his tone calm with the habit of authority. "The end of the world is fast approaching. If we manage to avert it, there will be ample time later to discuss Buffy's horrible taste in men. If we do not, it will hardly matter."

And that had been enough. She didn't know why Xander quieted so easily. Perhaps it was the looming apocalypse, perhaps his missing eye that reminded him he owed the vampire a debt of gratitude. More likely, she thought, as she watched him drop his eyes to Anya's slender hand gripped tight in his large calloused one, perhaps he just realised that everyone, even a slayer, might just want to hold someone's hand before the world ended.

"The book also refers to a number of spells that can be used to—for want of a better word—activate the scythe." Giles perched himself on the table top eyes still riveted to the text before him, deep lines of concentration etched in his forehead. "But it's also fair to assume that since this was found in Caleb's lair, he also knows how to do this."

"Maybe we could make our own army more powerful." Willow joined the discussion. "The text mentions that the scythe is a channel of power. I have a theory…I'm not sure, but I think maybe I could use the scythe to share out the power."

"How?" Suddenly there was an urgency to their discussion, a collective acceleration towards solution.

"I think I could make all the potentials into Slayers using the scythe." Buffy studied the witch thoughtfully. She might still hide behind "I think" and "maybe." but her confidence, her power, was obvious for all that. If Willow thought she could do it, then she was fairly certain Willow could do it. And it was so very tempting. A small army of slayers, and if by some miracle they actually survived the coming showdown, then everything would change.

"No." She shook her head, crushing that impossible dream before it began to worm its way into her heart. "It won't work. There just aren't enough of us. What the shadow men showed me—thousands and thousands of uber-vamps—even a hundred slayers couldn't beat them back."

Spike turned towards her, she could feel his gaze like bonfire heat against her cheek, making her other side feel chilled. "It is for her alone to wield." The words were spoken so softly that only Buffy, sitting close to the vampire, could make them out. She turned to him, waiting for explanation, but he was still just looking at her, brows pinched together in thought.

"Spike," she prompted when the room had fallen silent and tense.

He blinked once, lashes falling and rising slowly over unfocused eyes. "Hhmmm?"

She made an annoyed, impatient gesture with her free hand and raised her eyebrows.

"Oh, right." His focus whiplashed back to her, and she felt herself tugged deeper into the intensity of his gaze. "I keep hearing that, in your bloody books. Nice bird in the temple said it, too. So maybe we're being wrong-headed here. Maybe we shouldn't be spreading the power about, spreading it thin like. Maybe—"

"We should be concentrating it." Same wavelength, as always. She thought briefly of those sickeningly smug couples that finish each other’s sentences, and could almost have laughed at the ridiculousness of notion.

"Yeah. For her—" he poked a finger of his free hand into her chest, "alone to wield."

………………………………………………………………….

"We all set for the big day then?" his quiet voice danced over the brittle silence of sleeping house and she gifted him a fleeting smile over her shoulder.

"Apparently so. Willow's spazzing about the spell. I haven't seen her like this since before our SAT's. She's in complete cram mode." She frowned as she put away the last of the crockery. What she was doing washing up the night before going into battle was anyone's guess, but somehow she didn't want to leave the house in a mess. Her mother would have been so proud. "So, provided she doesn't go all black-eyed and switch teams, I figure she'll pull it off."

"Reckon Red's done enough team-switching for one lifetime." His grin was a little lewd, and she rolled her eyes with faux annoyance and switched off the kitchen light. The soft lamplight filtering down the hall cast shadows on his face, and she found herself struck by how good he looked. Oh, he'd always looked good. Over the course of their so-called relationship, she'd lusted after him with a bestial intensity that had been at least as frightening as it had been exciting, but this was different. He looked soft and handsome in the gloom, and she found herself strangely bashful in her sloppy sweats and messy hair.

"Faith has my bed." She blushed violently at the outburst and gave him a sheepish grin, knowing the dark would do nothing to mask her embarrassment. "There really should have been some lead in to that statement."

"No worries, pet. Have mine." He opened the basement door and waved her through with a slight bow.

"Thanks." Her hand brushed over his arm and she smiled her gratitude as she stepped past him into the near blackness. The light switch was half way down the stairs—one of those incredibly stupid design features that every house seems to have—and she had to feel her way cautiously along the wall as she blindly navigated the first four steps. The harsh, shadeless bulb was painfully bright, and she blinked rapidly as she turned to him again.

"Spike?" she called out, alarmed at the sight of him turning away from the doorway. Where did he think he was going? Didn't he know she needed him tonight? Her voice came out in an annoyed and petulant hiss. "Where are you going?"

"I, er…" He looked confused, brows pinched together as he made a helpless one-handed gesture towards the kitchen. "Kitchen floor'll do me fine. I've slept on worse."

"What? No." She pursed her lips. She didn't need this now; she needed sleep, not crossed wires and insecurity. "No floor." He looked a little startled by her outburst, and she adjusted her tone and reached out a hand in welcome. "Maybe tonight you could just stay with me."

He looked unsure and hopeful and curious, like there were a million questions swimming in his mind, but all he did was take her had and run his thumb gently over the skin as he quirked a lopsided smile at her. "Okay."





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