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Author's Chapter Notes:
Thank you for the reviews on the previous chapter.Even though it's fun to write this for it's own sake, it's also lovely to know there is someone out there enjoying it as well. Thank you.
"She comes back to tell me she's gone.
As if I didn't know that,
As if I didn't know my own bed,
As if I'd never noticed,
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead.
And she said losing love,
Is like a window in your heart.
Everybody sees you're blown apart,
Everybody sees the wind blow."
- Paul Simon, "Graceland"

It had been too easy to slip back into the heavy thrum of her daily life and ignore what had happened in the cemetery. She had avoided seeing Spike since that night when something in her had split and hot tears had begun to roll down her face to splash on his hands. He'd held her then while his hands, it always goes back to them, had rubbed small soothing circles across her shoulder blades and his voice had begun a soft crooning of comfort in her ear. She'd let him hold her for a long while even after the tears had stopped, taking the selfish comfort which he unflinchingly offered her even as she began shutting down and moving far away from him.

A moment of weakness.

She'd never have let him say the words to her again otherwise. She never would have remained in what she suspected he deemed silent acceptance as he pressed another kiss to her lips, her mouth parting in a suspiciously sweet gasp to take him in one more time before reality came rushing back in a deafening echo and the beauty faded from the night. Her body had gone limp as a rag doll before hardening into angles as she pushed him off her roughly, the memory of who she was supposed to be shuttering her gaze from his as she turned and ran off down the street before she forgot again.

What I'm not any more.

So she endeavored to forget him instead. And it was easy during the day, when she could slip into the rotting sticky cotton candy sugariness of the life her friends had made for her where there was no need to think or feel or be in any real way. She only had to trust in their guidance and her feet would move accordingly down that graying placid road to where another grave awaited her. It was as close to oblivion as she could get here on earth, an unceasing extension of nothingness that would whittle down the years into starkness. There was only death that way and she embraced it willingly.

Safe as houses.

Yes, she was safe then. Listening to her friends laugh and joke as if nothing had changed, watching Willow spiral deeper into darkness as she spent her nights strung out in a psychedelic whirl and her days pale and drawn in the shadows, and then there was Dawn. Dawn. The only one who suspected that not everything was right, that looked past the half-hearted smiles and job search and frozen pizza dinners to sense the emptiness that lurked within her. And shouldn’t she know? She was the Eve to her Adam, a shining glowing piece of Buffy which stomped and pouted and slammed doors in an emotional teenage rollercoaster that Buffy could no longer relate to.

For her sake Buffy tried. She suggested movie nights and window shopping trips that should have re-forged the bonds of sisterly closeness but which only served to thicken the wall between them. She tried anyway, ignoring the flat look in Dawn’s eyes when she insisted they stay in that night and “hang”. She chose instead to focus on the moments when the teenager let her guard down long enough to rest her head against Buffy’s shoulder for her sister to stroke her hair as she’d done when she was still small enough to really believe Buffy was a hero.

But they both knew better now.

Heroes didn’t come back from the dead just to go on living as if they were still six feet under. They didn’t neglect their responsibilities or let their little sister befriend vampires and live with out of control witches. They didn’t lie with every smile or sleep with aforementioned vampires in order to feel anything that was real in a world that felt stuffed with gauze. Heroes didn’t forget who they where and what their purpose was. And, most importantly, heroes knew how to love. No, she wasn’t anybody’s hero any more.

I came back wrong.

If only they could see.

But still it was easier during the day; when she could pretend that she was well beyond temptation, secure in her bubblegum plastic world. Nightfall was inevitable however and she was aware of it now as she had never been before, her entire body flushing in anticipation until finally the sun dipped below the horizon. She’d leave without a second thought; more than ready to hunt, to kill, to complete the one task that she knew she could still excel at. Her ferocity frightened her yet her desires, which seeped sluggishly through her veins, so much darker now than she ever wanted to admit even to herself, scared her more.

* * *

She could almost pretend everything was alright as she spun, kicked, punched, tore into the Lilliad demon who had wandered into her path. The light of the full moon turning his pasty face into a luminescent beacon which transfixed her as she shoved her hands through its rib cage and removed what passed for its heart. It fell to the ground with a strange gurgling noise and then went still and silent. The calm stretched out around her as she stood over her kill, eyes still glued to the demon’s face which was now slack-jawed in the throes of death. Before she knew what she was doing she found herself lying belly down in the wet grass beside the demon, her body trying to mimic the tranquility of the body alongside her.

The ground was cool beneath her flesh. Tentatively, she stretched out one hand to tough the congealing flesh but pulled it back at the sight of the demon’s blood on her palm. Wiping it on the grass she tucked it under her cheek as if to hide the tool of her adversary’s demise from the uncaring sky. She counted her breaths. Tried to slow her heart beat. Imagined for a moment that she could feel her body sinking back into the earth where she had come from. But when her eyes re-opened and her gaze focused she was still there, the bright moon beaming down on her, the buzz of crickets in the back ground, and a back inky wave rolling through her as she pushed herself up from the ground and away from the scene of her crime.

She shivered uncontrollably, her teeth practically chattering as her feet fumbled and pushed her on a mad weave through the cemetery. All around her darkness closed in on the edge of her vision and for a moment the world tilted wildly to the side before righting itself and leaving her deposited in front of the familiar mausoleum. He was home, she could sense him.

This is wrong.

Her disclaimer ran on loop in her mind and for a moment she considered leaving before her tilt-a-whirl returned and tumbled her through the front door with a bang and into his arms. She didn’t give him a chance to speak before her mouth found his hungrily, hands tearing at his clothes as she threw herself at him wildly in a search for something indefatigable, that strange new spark that seemed to flare inside her at his every touch.

There.

He whispered her name against her mouth and she felt the dark sluggish thing inside her retreat beneath the flame.

Spike.





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