Chapter VII: Over
"Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."
-William Shakespeare
Buffy hung silently from her chains in darkness. Spike had put out the light almost as soon as he had turned it on, and then had left her mostly in silence with her thoughts. Back in time? Really? As if she hadn't had twenty lifetime's worth of disturbing impossibilities packed in to her thirty years of life, now she had to deal with time travel? She'd asked him how, but had only gotten more of his vague anecdotal lecturing, and nothing in the way of actual answers. From what she gathered inside her dumbfounded mind, they were in the past sometime after Willow had brought her back from the dead, and sometime before Spike left to get back his soul. What she couldn't understand was, if she was here, who was in the void she'd left in the future, and where was the Buffy who was supposed to be here?
And why wasn't Spike's soul left intact?
She didn't understand, and her mind reeled… but Spike wasn't answering any more of her questions. He wasn't speaking at all actually. She may have appreciated this earlier, but now that she finally understood how far off the deep end Spike had really gone, the silence was more eerie than anything else. He'd been quiet for the last half hour at least.
"Spike…" Buffy tried again.
Nothing. For all she knew, he wasn't even there anymore.
She shifted her wrists a little to try and redistribute her weight, but all she got for her trouble was a sharp and stinging pain that shot down her arms. A sound like a wounded animal escaped from her lips…
And finally, she began to cry.
"It wont hurt much longer." Came Spike's voice from where Buffy knew his bed to be. He must have just lain there watching her since he'd stopped speaking. She couldn't see him, but she could imagine him lounging with his hands behind his head… staring at her through the darkness with yellow eyes.
"Please, Spike…" Buffy started, giving up all pretense of strength, all of her – what had he called it? False bravado.
"I can feel you fading away." Was all he said.
"You fought for your soul… just to throw it all away? Just to bring us back here?"
Spike remained quiet long enough to make Buffy think he wasn't going to respond… until he did.
"I was a joke." He said, and now he was closer to her, no longer speaking to her from the bed. He was moving toward her.
"What?"
"I did fight for my soul." He answered, and now he was right in front of her. "I saw, despite how much I loved you, what I was still capable of doing to you… and it scared even me."
That was a telling statement. Was he scaring himself now?
Buffy had stopped crying, but tears still rolled sporadically down her cheeks.
"But it wasn't all bad in here." He whispered, and maybe he had his hand over his heart, that's what Buffy imagined – but she couldn't see him. "I admit, it wasn't all sweet singing nightingales either, but it wasn't just about the pain. I wanted… You know what I wanted to do for you?"
Buffy didn't respond.
"I wanted to…" He laughed a little. "I thought about it. I planned it out in my head."
"What are you talking about?"
"A garden." He whispered hoarsely. Buffy didn't know what to say. "I wanted to plant you a garden. Something beautiful and…" He trailed off for a moment, his voice cracking a bit. "Alive."
Buffy felt him reach up over her. She heard a clicking sound, and then a second later one of her arms fell free. She cried out suddenly from the unexpected pain of hanging from only one battered wrist… and then her other arm was released, and she toppled in a heap to the floor.
"That night I came to you, you were hurt and I could see it." Spike continued. He was kneeling down to her. Buffy's head spun from what was happening. He had let her go, but she was too tired and weak to try and stand. "If you hadn't been hurt, what happened that night never would have happened. You couldn't fight me off at first."
Buffy closed her eyes and let the feel of the cold dirt beneath her sink in to her flesh. She remembered.
"But more than that…" Spike said, "You thought that if you begged me, that I would stop. That means that somewhere along the line, you stopped thinking I was capable of hurting you." He paused. "Just like I thought."
"All you did was hurt me." Buffy whispered.
Buffy could hear the crunching of the dirt as Spike backed himself against a wall.
"I didn't understand that." He responded. "The most ironic thing about it was, if you'd have trusted me enough to let yourself love me back then, I never would have done what I did… but by not trusting me, you forced me to prove you right." He laughed. "Even if I never hurt you, it didn't make me the kind of man who would never hurt you."
He took a deep breath.
"That's why I went after the soul."
"And now… what?" Buffy rasped, her eyes still closed – the cold from the earth still seeping in to her body. She understood why he'd let her go. He knew she was done. There was nothing left in her that could fight back. He'd taken everything from her, and now he was going to sit up against a dirt wall and watch her die. "Decided the soul wasn't a good fit? Did they ask you for your receipt when you gave it back?"
Spike sort of laughed.
"I fought for my soul, because you made me see that I could still hurt you. I couldn't-" He cut off abruptly, and then paused. "I wasn't in control. I didn't get the soul back to be a better man; I got it back so that I could choose for myself what I was. I once told Angel that I kept fighting because I knew it was right… truth is, I had no idea what was right. No sodding clue."
Buffy swallowed.
"Wanting to get your soul back for any reason made you a better man."
"Could be." Spike said with something not unlike anger in his voice, but also not quite similar to it either. "That's getting in to the nature of morality though, isn't it, love? I've never been one much for philosophy, but I do remember some of the bloody doctrine the tutors crammed in my head."
The tutors. He'd probably had a governess, too. Wasn't that how it was back then? She forgot, sometimes, how old Angel and Spike really were. They wore the faces of young men, but those were just the faces of victims long dead. He went on.
"Is a good act good in and of itself, or is it the intention behind it what makes it good? Or bad? And can a good act done by a bad man still be considered good?"
"I failed philosophy." Buffy said blankly.
"I saved a family of three once, during one of the wars." He sounded almost nostalgic. "I did it so they would trust me… so that they would tell me where the others were hiding." He laughed. "They thought I was going to help them all."
"What did you do?"
A pause.
"What do you think?"
She might have remembered reading something about Spike massacring a group of refugees during WWI… or She remembered Giles reading it and telling her about it. Really, she'd heard a lot about Spike in those first days he'd showed up in Sunnydale.
"So." Spike said. "Was the act of saving those people good or bad?"
"You didn't save them." Buffy answered. "You just saved them for later."
"Bad example, I suppose." He sighed. "Anyway, I got my soul because I thought we could be together if I had a soul. I thought you would love me."
She did love him… God, she did. It may not have been the kind of love he wanted, but he had been important to her. She regretted not letting him know just how important, so that maybe it might never have come to this, but she realized that she hadn't completely understood until now. It took losing him this way to show her how much she had really loved him.
She was too tired to cry now.
"But you didn't love me when I came back from Africa. You didn't love me until I was about to die… then when I came back from that, you went on your merry way, pretending none of it ever happened." He laughed angrily. "I remember being so afraid that you would find out I was alive and that suddenly everything I had done for you would be worthless. Turns out I was right."
"It wasn't worthless."
Why was she even bothering?
"I did a lot of good. Saved a lot of people. Made and lost a lot of friends…but I was never free of you. But when I finally saw you again, you'd moved on."
Buffy wanted to say something, but she didn't know what – and in any case, he kept talking.
"And now I'm here. We're here. And I'm… different."
Different. Soulless.
"How do you know? Maybe it's just-"
Spike chuckled.
"How do I know?" He asked, interrupting her. It was just as well; she hadn't really even known what she was going to say. "There are several tip-offs. For starters, for the first time in a long time I feel incredibly… peckish." He uttered the word pointedly, allowing all that it implied to sink in, and then continued. "Not to mention the fact that the idea of siring you a new one had never actually occurred to me until now. Don't know why. Just seems so obvious."
So he never meant to lose his soul. What did that mean? Did it mean anything? She didn't know. She was so confused, and she felt sick.
It took everything Buffy was to pull herself up to a sitting position against the wall behind her, flinching as she moved. Spike didn't try to stop her. She wished that he would have, because that would have shown that he at least thought she could get away.
"How did I get here?" She asked.
"Well, I dragged you here." Spike answered matter-of-factly.
"No, how did I get back here? To this time?"
"Oh, that?" Spike asked. "Funny story, really. I was just out and about in London, minding my own business when it happened."
"When what—"
"I was knocked unconscious. Woke up in a situation not too dissimilar to the one you now find yourself in. I don't know who it was. Couldn't see him… but he put his hand on my chest, and I could feel the burning in my heart and see the flash of light behind my eyes." A beat. "I could feel him reaching in to my soul, Buffy."
"Spike, what are you—"
"He saw what was there. Generations of murder and bloodshed… and you. He saw what I did to you."
Buffy was breathing hard now, realizing there was so much more going on than she could possibly have understood before.
"I get it." Spike continued. "He sent us back here because this was when you were most vulnerable to me. This was when I was most capable of hurting you. When my love for you could make me hurt you."
Buffy thought back to when Spike had attacked her. She'd been doing… something. What had she been doing? She couldn't remember. It was like she'd just been dropped in to the cemetery out of nowhere and hadn't realized it. She was there one second, the vampire showed up, and then Spike right after. Now that she thought about it, everything clicked in to place. She never patrolled by herself anymore, and if for some reason she did – never alone. Also, cemeteries? Not so much her style anymore.
She had been back in Sunnydale, circa sometime around 2002 complete with a 21-year-old's body, before she'd even seen Spike's face… and she hadn't even noticed.
"He sent us back here so you could kill me." Buffy whispered.
"Tell her what she's won." Spike said almost as quietly. "Way I figure it, we were sent back so I could take you out before you ever have a chance to raise your army of girly wrath. Change history."
Buffy's heart raced. That was it. That explained everything. This had never been his plan. He was being used. They were both being used.
"We're being played with, Spike." She said urgently. "You can stop this."
"But I wont."
"Why are you letting this happen?"
"Because I've seen the future, love… and I don't feature myself going through all that pain and trouble again. From what I remember, the pay off wasn't quite worth it."
"That's the no soul talking." Buffy argued. "But there was something good in you without it."
"Oh, now you sing me a different song!" Spike said on a laugh. "I tried for years to convince that I could be good without a soul, but it was always 'evil, soulless, thing' with you. I think here they call that flip-flopping. Very unattractive quality."
"You have to know that this is wrong."
"Yes, I do know. I also don't care."
"How—"
"Because I love you, Buffy!" He growled violently, startling her out of her words. "Whatever he was that sent me back, he knew that, knowing what I know, I would do it. He knew if I didn't have a soul that I'd turn you, and I don't bloody give a damn. He was right. Let him be right."
Buffy closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the wall.
"All that." She said quietly. "Just to end up back here."
A pause.
"Ain't love grand?"
Something inside Buffy snapped in half, and she began to laugh brokenly.
"Something funny?" Spike asked.
"You are." She answered, sliding back down the wall to her side. "We changed the world together just so you could wipe it all away. Everyone's going to die. Dawn, the potentials… everything we fought for. Everything you died for…"
"I died for you."
"And now I get to die for you." Buffy responded. "Poetic enough for you?"
"Right." Spike said solemnly. "I suppose it is."
A heavy silence hung in the air for a few moments.
"Where will my soul go?" She asked, in a detached sort of way, suddenly very curious as to what was going to happen to her – the part of her that would be gone. "Will it go back where I was before? Will it go to heaven without me?"
"I…" Spike started, sounding stricken. "I don't know, Buffy."
"Your soul didn't have some kind of… soul memory?"
"I don't think it works that way." A beat. "I don't know what a soul is. Never did. Maybe it's not the kind of thing that goes anywhere. Maybe it just… goes to sleep. Having one, losing it, having it again… didn't seem to change who I was. Fundamentally speaking, anyway. It changed what I was, but maybe a soul doesn't have anything to do with who we are."
"There was nothing left of Angel when he lost his soul."
"Angel." Spike spat out. "Yeah, like he's a prime example. You ever stop to wonder as to his deeper seated character issues?"
"No."
"Well, love will blind you to a lot of things." He said caustically. "Anyway, seems to me that when it comes to what happens to a person after their soul's gone, personality can go a long way."
"Personalities make up for bad hair, not for killing helpless women."
"Helpless." Spike rolled the word out from his tongue. "Is that what you think you are?"
"No, I'm…" Buffy said, and she thought that she could feel the beginning of what losing consciousness must have felt like. She wasn't really sure though, because she never remembered what it felt like by the time she woke up. She was going to try to make some kind of sarcastic joke about being all kinds of "helpful", when something occurred to her.
When she went unconscious this time, would it be for the last time?
"Scared." Buffy admitted without realizing she had at first. When the word "scared" floated past her ears in her own voice, she knew that it was true. She was terrified.
A long and unpleasant silence spanned out between them in the darkness before Spike finally spoke.
"Me too."
My father died in 1862 when I was ten years old. One hundred and forty nine years have passed since then, and now I can't remember his face. I can't remember the color of his eyes or his hair… I can't even remember his name. I stopped using it, and I forgot it. Time has a way of taking things from you when you're not looking. You never know when the last time you're going to be thinking about something is going to be the last time… but there's a last time for everything.
The only thing I do remember about my father is that his death was the first in my life. It was the first time I was introduced to the human weakness of mortality. The first time I understood what it really meant to be alive. Being alive meant, at some point, you would be dead. It terrified me.
Isn't that funny? I was terrified of death.
"What are you doing here?" I asked, exasperated, from my armchair. I didn't need to turn around to see that it was Dawn who'd just walked in to my crypt. "I thought you and your mum'd be bonding over steaming cups of love by now."
If she kept her word, you never knew that I'd tried to help her bring your mother back. Now you know.
"It… didn't work." She answered.
I looked down, a kind of sadness I hadn't known in over a century washing over me, and then stood up to face her. Her cheeks were flushed and the skin around her eyes was swollen. She'd been crying. I tilted my head.
"Didn't work, or didn't work out?" I asked.
"Were you scared?" She asked, ignoring my question, but that was as much an answer as anything else. I watched her, waiting for the rest. She swallowed. "When you died?"
I looked her in the eyes.
"I didn't have a chance to be." I answered her truthfully. "And neither did your mother."
Her eyes flashed wide for a moment as though she was surprised that I knew what she was really getting at. She stepped down farther in to the crypt, and I instinctively took a step back.
"Why do people have to die?" She asked.
She had never had to deal with death before, and she had come to me, a dead man, to get answers. She wanted to know why. Why? I'd killed hundreds of people whose last word was "why". I didn't have an answer for them, and I didn't have an answer for her.
"I'm…" I started, and then trailed off. "I'm not the one who can help you with this."
She stepped closer to me again, and again I stepped back.
I felt… afraid. I had never been in that kind of position before, never had to comfort someone after a death. Usually I was the one causing the death, and so the ability to soften the blow had long escaped me. I was uncomfortable and my heart hurt for her – which just made me more uncomfortable. If that chip hadn't been in my head at the time, I might have knocked her unconscious just so I could get away from her without looking like a coward.
"What's it like to die?"
She stared at me, and I stared back. Dying was like falling in to an abyss, trying so hard to find something to catch hold of – anything to stop from falling any deeper. You can feel yourself slipping away, and no matter how hard you scream… you don't make a sound.
"It was like going to sleep." I answered her. It was a lie, but lying was the only comfort I knew how to give.
She broke eye contact, and her gaze fell to the floor. I watched her silently for a few seconds.
"Oh." She said, then turned slowly… and walked out of the crypt, leaving the door open behind her. I don't know how long I stood there staring with a slack jaw after she'd left. I was unhappy about Joyce's death from the second I'd found out about it. She had always been nice to me, even when she had no bloody right in the world to be. I liked her… and I didn't want you to hurt. But it didn't touch me. Death was death, and I was used to it. When Dawn came to my crypt that night asking questions that terrified me to try and answer…
That had been the first time since I died that death had touched me.
They'd had your funeral during the day.
It wasn't a funeral in the traditional sense. There was no priest, no chairs to sit on, no flowers. There were only six people in attendance… the scoobies. Giles had taken care of all the arrangements, I think. The coffin. The headstone. At the time I had understood the need for secrecy as a way to keep the demon world at bay. No one could know you were dead, because no one could know the slayer was dead. I guess I know now that it had also been a way to avoid some kind of weird uproar when Willow brought you back.
We had all done our part to dig the grave itself the night before. Xander had put up a half hearted fight at first, didn't want me helping with something so intimate to them… but when I ignored him all together, we just dug in silence.
I couldn't stay long to watch them bury you. I had tried to hide beneath the trees and a particularly thick blanket, but the sun was bright that day. Too bright. I hated it for having the audacity to shine now that you were dead. I hated it for keeping me from you when the rest of them could get as close as they liked. Soon you would be buried beneath an infinity of dirt, and would be untouchable forever.
I couldn't even say a proper goodbye.
The smoke had been rising from my body for a good couple of minutes before I finally pulled myself away and back to the darkness.
When the sun set, I went back. I half expected to see them all still there, quietly standing vigil over your grave… but you were alone. For the first time since I'd known you, you were really alone.
It was too much.
I fell to my knees a foot from your headstone. I could hear sounds around me. Wailing. Screaming. The sound of someone's heart breaking in two. I looked around confused… and it wasn't until I brought my hand to my face and felt the tears that I realized the sounds were coming from me.
Dawn was sitting in my chair when I came up from beneath. I was never surprised to see her anymore. I never really felt much of anything actually. You'd been gone for eleven days, and I had stopped caring about most things.
"Haven't seen you around." She said, watching me as I walked toward the back of my crypt, sitting in the corner on a stone slab – putting as much distance between the two of us as I could.
I wanted to snap her neck, but without any real passion. It was a detached sort of desire. I mostly just wanted her out of my crypt. She smelled too much like you.
"I brought you some blood." She said when I didn't answer her. I looked at her, taken off guard by that.
"How sweet." I said.
She looked down.
"Why haven't you come by the house?" She asked. I gave her a small ironic laugh.
"My presence was never much appreciated in your neck of the woods if memory serves."
The truth was, I had gone every night to your house. It was as much to feel near you as it was to make sure Dawn was safe. At that point, your pals hadn't asked me look over her yet, so I took care of her from the shadows.
"Do you miss her?" She asked me.
I swallowed, and wasn't able to meet her eyes.
"Does it matter?" I asked.
"I miss her."
"I'm sure you do."
"No one talks about her at home." She said. "I think they're afraid of upsetting me or something."
"They're probably more afraid of upsetting themselves."
"Willow fixed the robot." She said after a while. "I… I like having it around. It's like having—"
"That thing is nothing like Buffy." I said bitterly.
"You liked it enough."
I bit down.
"Why are you here?" I asked, trying my hardest not to let my irritation get the better of me.
"I just…" She stopped and took a breath. "I just want to talk to someone who doesn't treat me like a little girl."
"Then you came to the wrong crypt, pet. Now run along like a good child and…"
She was crying.
"I killed her." She said.
I closed my eyes tightly to that. I could see how she would feel responsible, but she was wrong.
I had killed you.
"Dawn-"
"It was my blood, Spike." She sobbed. "If it wasn't for me, Buffy would still be here."
That was true. God, I hated her.
"If it wasn't for Buffy, you wouldn't be." I answered. I didn't want to comfort her, but I couldn't hurt her either. Hurting her would go against my promise of protecting her, so I bit my tongue and reigned in my anger. "You didn't kill her. She saved your life. She saved all our lives."
Every single one of us. You'd saved us all. The world didn't deserve what you'd done for it.
"I was going to jump. It was supposed to be me."
"But it wasn't." I said, standing up. "You think this is what she wanted? Do you think she gave her life for you just so you could come here and whine to me about it?" I began stalking toward her. She looked surprised at my words.
"Spike-"
"Right, came to me to get some grown-up talking to… and that's what you're going to get." I came to stand directly in front of her. She looked up at me.
"Buffy loved you." I ground out. "That's more than most of us pathetic wankers got. She loved you so much that she gave you the only thing she had left to give… her death."
"I didn't ask her for that!" She cried.
"Well too bloody bad, bit." I said, kneeling suddenly in front of her and taking her by the arms. I bore my eyes in to hers. "Love isn't pretty, and love isn't fun… it's pain and it's death, and now you're alive because of it. If all you're going to do with this gift she gave you is sit around and lament it for the rest of your life, you might as well go spit on her grave."
She broke down in front of me, and I let her collapse in to my arms. I closed my eyes and stayed still for a moment before pressing her to me, running my hand over the back of her head. That was the only time I would ever speak to her about you that way.
"Do you think it hurt?" She asked, and the sound was muffled somewhat by my chest.
"Just like going to sleep." I answered in to her hair, lying to her again. I had no idea if you felt any pain. Truth was, the question tormented me. "Remember?"
My crypt door opened.
"Spike!" Xander said urgently as he crashed in uninvited. "Dawn's…" He stopped as we both turned to look at him, my arms still around her. "Here." He said, furrowing his forehead and crossing his arms over his chest.
"Bloody hell." I said, letting Dawn go. We both stood.
"Did I just interrupt something very awkward and inappropriate?" He asked.
Dawn wiped away at her face as I stared at him, annoyed.
"She came to me, special-ed." I responded.
"It's true." Dawn said. "I—"
"Dawn, do me a favor." He interrupted her, but didn't take his eyes from mine. "While you're waiting outside for me, think of ten reasons why hanging out in a crypt with a vampire is not normal behavior for a teenage girl."
Dawn glanced at me, and then left the whelp and me alone. I bit at my bottom lip from the inside and looked him over with a smile.
"Am I in trouble?" I asked sarcastically.
"Look," he started. "I'm not going to pretend I don't hate you, because I do. In fact, if hate were a person he'd have a full time job sitting in the corner making your life miserable."
"Wonderful." I said blandly. "Anything else you wanted to tell me that makes no impact on my life whatsoever?"
He sighed, seeming to switch gears.
"You helped us before. Would it be the dumbest thing I've ever done to assume that you'd do it again?"
"I don't know about the dumbest. There's some pretty stiff competition there."
He laughed, but didn't really laugh.
"Yeah. I guess that's what I thought." He said, and then turned to walk away.
"Seeing as how the bot's back in proper order, I guess that means you lot are thinking about picking up the slaying slack." I said, stopping him. He turned back to me.
"Are you in?" He asked.
"You're asking me if I want to kill things?" I asked. "Have we really grown so far apart?"
He merely nodded, and then was gone. I guess that's how the saddest alliance of my life was born.
I turned away from the door and slumped in to my chair.
I hadn't answered Dawn, but I'm certain she knew. I did miss you.
Once, not too long after Willow had brought you back, we sat outside my crypt on a cold stone bench. There had been no action all night, and you hadn't said a word for about an hour. We just sat there together in the silence, you staring down at the stake in your hands. I didn't know what you wanted from me, but I wanted to give you whatever it was anyway… so I didn't try to speak. Anyway, in those first couple of weeks, I found that staring at you was the only way to convince myself that it was true, that you were really back. It was the only way to dull the pain in my heart that had lived there since you had died.
"I remember…" You started, and I was slightly startled by the sudden break of the quiet. I watched you, but your eyes still rested on the stake. "I remember what it felt like, the exact moment I wasn't alive anymore."
I said nothing. I had a feeling you didn't care if I responded anyway.
"It was like… my whole body tingled, except I knew it wasn't my body. I wasn't my body."
I didn't mean to ask you what I asked next, but something in me needed to know.
"Did it hurt?" I asked.
You breathed in and out slowly a couple of times before giving me an answer.
"No." You said, shaking your head only slightly, your eyes glazing over with tears.
I didn't want to feel relief just then, not when you seemed so unhappy about it… but I did. It had hurt when I died, and I didn't want that for you. Even though it was over, even though you were back – I couldn't stand the thought of you dying in pain.
"Count yourself lucky then, pet." I said, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in my heart as I watched you brush away a stray tear. I wanted to put my arms around you and let you soak my skin with those tears that no one else would let you cry. I wanted to hold you until there was no pain left for you to cry out.
"Oh yeah, I'm really lucky." You said, standing up and walking away. I followed you. Of course I followed you.
"Yeah, well… death isn't always as pretty as you seem to remember yours being." I said, falling in to step with you, a slight pang of irritation rising up in my cold blood.
"And it probably wont be next time."
"There won't be a next time." I said, my chest constricting as the thought of any "next time" briefly filtered through my thoughts.
You stopped and turned to me, incredulousness in your eyes.
"Spike, I'm the slayer. Dead before 25 ring any bells?" You laughed a little, and I moved my head to one side. "Why did they bother?"
You shook your head and started walking again. I stayed where I was.
"Because they love you." I answered. It was an honest and true answer to your question. I wasn't defending them. You kept walking away.
"Great, why don't you all get out your 'we love Buffy' pins and start a club?"
I clenched my jaw in anger, and caught up with you.
"You should have done us all a favor and stayed dead." I said, walking past you in to the darkness of the cemetery.
When I had you pinned beneath me, watching you struggle and scream… I think a thousand tortured thoughts were coursing through my mind. I had had you, hadn't I? Sometime in that dark and twisted year, you had been mine. You had come to me and had shared the darkness with me. You gave me your body and I rested in it for hours at a time, loving you so much it ripped me apart… but it was the only peace I had ever really known. Then you took it away from me. You took away every measure of peace I'd ever felt, and tore it to pieces with your perfect little hands. I watched it bleed at your feet while you laughed at me. Laughed in my face. Laughed at the idea that someone as pure and beautiful as you could ever love a thing like me. You broke me. You broke my heart and my spirit, and there was nothing left of me. There was only you, and I needed you. I loved you so much.
I needed that peace back. I needed to feel you against me again. I needed you inside me again – because you had been more inside me than I had ever been in you. If you would only let me close enough. If you would give me one more chance to show you what I felt for you; to prove to you what we had was real. It was deep and intense and no one would ever make you feel what I could make you feel.
I… just wanted you to feel it.
When you finally pushed me off of you, it was like some kind of spell had been broken. The intense misery and desperation I had felt just seconds before had dulled back to its normal ache. I watched you wrench yourself up from the floor and pull your robe closed. The tears that slipped from your eyes might as well have been falling from mine, they hurt me so much to see. I had caused them. I know I had hit you in the past, had hurt you, had even tried to kill you… but I had never been able to make you cry. You had never let me inside long enough to make you cry. But there you were, shocked and bruised. I had finally gotten inside your heart, and this is how it ended up.
God, Buffy, I'd done so many cruel and evil things before that point, but that was the only time I ever felt like a monster.
"Ask me again why I could never love you!" You said to me, your voice heavy with emotion.
I don't remember ever having asked you that to begin with. I only remember trying to force you to admit it wasn't true. I never thought you didn't love me, and maybe that had been the problem.
"Buffy, my God, I didn't—"
"Because I stopped you." You said, your voice cracking. "Something I should have done a long time ago."
I stared, stricken. A long time ago? No, dear God… if you'd said no from the beginning, I would have died from heartbreak. I didn't want you to regret me. I wanted to make you happy. I never wanted to hurt you. I just wanted to love you.
"Get out." You said firmly, hatred evident in everything about you.
I swallowed, and closed my eyes, trying to get the image out of my head, trying to get it all out of my head. Trying to force the ringing out of my ears. This was all wrong. This couldn't have just happened. Yet when I opened my eyes you were still there, still crying, still shaking.
"Please, Buffy, I'm—"
"Don't you dare say you're sorry."
But I was sorry. God, I was so sorry.
Even after everything, even after that, the thought that you could only be so hurt because you really had loved me still circulated through my head. All I wanted at that moment was to wrap my arms around you and hold you while you cried. I wanted to run my hand through your hair and whisper to you that everything would be okay. That I loved you and would never hurt you.
Even though I just did.
"Get. Out." You repeated. My legs started moving me toward the door, toward you, but you kept your distance and effectively switched places with me as I moved – never taking your eyes from mine. It was like you were afraid of me. I had always thought that you fearing me would feel gratifying in some way, but it just hurt.
"I love you." I said desperately, since you wouldn't let me apologize.
You stared silently, unbelievingly, for only a second before letting loose.
"Love?" You nearly roared, still clutching tightly to your robe. "You think this is love?" You asked, gesturing toward the bathroom floor. I couldn't look. "This is pain and violence, and it's ugly! I don't know how I ever got so lost to be able to ever let you touch me, but this isn't love! You're pathetic and disgusting, and this will never be love."
"I never meant—"
"Get out!" You screamed at me, grabbing a bar of soap from the sink and hurling it toward my head. I ducked in time to miss it, but you were already throwing something else at me. "Get out of here!" You threw another object, and then another. I heard my heart crack a little more each time. Finally I opened the door, shock making my eyes wide and my mouth hang open.
I finally felt it. I finally understood it.
You hated me.
I turned back to look at you one more time. Your face was red and streaked with black lines.
"I hate you." You said from behind clenched teeth.
Might as well have staked me.
I walked backwards out of the bathroom, and then stumbled in a drunken-like stupor down the stairs. I stared up toward the bathroom until I was at the front door, and then I still stared up the stairs.
Memories flashed through my head.
"I know you'll never love me…"
I'd said those words from the same spot that I stood at that moment.
"What did you do?"
I had asked Dawn as you stood before me, back from the dead.
Now I stood there feeling empty and alone… and I knew nothing would ever be the same after that. I had always followed my heart, and now I'd followed it straight off a cliff.
It was over.
Buffy?