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CHAPTER 4 --

A/N: I couldn't believe all the reviews you guys gave me!! Thanks you sooo much! Please keep 'em coming!!!

Spike swung his car smoothly into the driveway of his father’s home, cringing as the gravel below kicked up against his freakishly expensive paintjob.

He didn’t get out of the car right away. Instead, he sat there, looking at the house. When he entered it was going to be different. His mother would not be there to greet him, hugging him and ushering him into the kitchen. It wouldn’t smell the same. None of those weird incenses and candles she liked to burn would be wafting through the house. The smell would have worn off days ago. Her stuff would still be there though. Knowing his father, it always would be.

Spike approached the front door. As welcoming as it looked, Spike hesitated, not sure whether to knock or just enter. He shook his head -- he was a stranger to his own bloody home. Sighing, he gently opened the door, poking his head around before allowing the rest of his body to cross the threshold.

Not seeing his dad, Spike turned around, letting the door shut loudly. His dad must have heard it, and came wandering into the living room. He looked like hell and was nursing a scotch in his left hand.

“Hey, Da,” Spike spoke quietly. Faced with the house and father he hadn’t seen in years.

“William,” Rupert breathed, sounding relieved to see him. He abandoned his drink on the counter to embrace his son.

Both men squeezed each other hard, and Spike allowed himself to be comforted in his father’s hug and allowed his true feelings to play over his features. But when Spike pulled back, his face was stone.

“I take it your trip was well,” Giles asked his son, pouring him his own drink.

Spike took the glass, nodding his head in thanks, “Yeah, fine.” Spike left the audience of his father to wander around the living room. In the middle was the coffee table he had hit his head on countless times as a kid. Spike walked over to the mantle. On it was numerous framed photographs of Giles, Jenny, and himself at all ages. Spike followed the pictures as they ascended in time. But he noticed the family progression stopped abruptly at his high school graduation. There was not one recent photograph of the lot of them. Not one. They were all of the family and William -- not Spike.

Holding out a hand to brace himself, Spike leaned against the mantle, closing his eyes. He breathed in and out rhythmically a few times before pushing away from the wall and joining his father at the kitchen table.

“These are all the cards that were sent,” Giles stated, pushing a pile of Hallmark sympathy cards to his son, “I thought you might like to see them.”

Spike nodded in the affirmative, but made no movement to touch them. They made the death of his mother all too real. He thought he had accepted the tragedy in the car on the way down, but as he sat there surrounded by his mother’s memories but not his mother, he came to the screeching conclusion that his mourning had yet to reach it’s precipice.

Spike pulled the cards toward him and shifted through the heartfelt wishes and attempted words of comfort. Some had even written their favorite memory of his mother inside the card -- proving that Jenny had brightened more lives than she would ever have known.

Spike knew for sure that she had been the saving grace of their family. His father and himself had always been the solemn bookish type. Jenny was what gave their home life. She never let Giles take himself too seriously and never let her son hole up in his room writing poetry. She had always told him that as a writer, he should revel in going out and finding new experiences. At the time he had scowled at her, telling her he wasn’t a sadist and had no interest going out to spend time with people he wouldn’t like.

Giles noticed the distracted reverie his son was in, “William . . .”

“It’s Spike now,” he interrupted.

Giles shot him a perturbed look, “Your mother may have indulged you in your flights of name-change fancy, but I will do nothing of the sort.” he sighed, “You may have despised yourself under that moniker, but your mother gave it to you.”

Spike was in no mood to fight and instead turned back to the stack of cards. Picking up the one that was on top of the pile, he studied the front. It was an intricate design of a bouquet of irises -- his mother’s favorite flower. He wandered who could have possibly have remembered such a fact. He opened it quizzically. The card was signed at the bottom by Joyce, Buffy, and Dawn Summers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



It was a miracle. They had all made it to the fourth grade alive. Even Xander. But, if the actions currently playing out on the kickball field were any indication, two out of their group of four weren’t going to live to the next recess.

“You’re shirty!” William screamed, his face already red from the argument he had been having with Buffy for the past ten minutes. It seemed like all they did was fight anymore. He couldn’t help it. Everything she did just made him so mad. The way she flipped her hair, the way her lower lip pouted anytime she didn’t get her way from him, the way she ate her cookie at lunch . . . The list went on and on.

Buffy slammed her hands on her hips, “That’s not even a word, William!”

“Is too!”

“Is not!”

“Is too!”

“Is not!”

“I’m going to pull your pigtail!” William warned.

“I’m going to trip you in the mud and make your trousers dirty!” Buffy hollered, using his own British term against him. They stood there steaming at each other, until Willow pulled Buffy away to play with her. Willow -- always the non-confrontationist.

William left to join Xander on the see-saw, taking turns jumping off the wooden plank, sending the other violently slamming into the ground.

“Will?” Xander ventured, obviously nervous.

“What?” William replied, having forgotten about his earlier troubles for a moment.

“Do you like Buffy?”

William’s brows knitted together, “Well, sure, she’s my friend and all. We fight, but . . .”

“No, what I mean is,” Xander braced himself, “do you LIKE like Buffy? As in boyfriend/girlfriend.”

William almost swallowed his tongue and immediately opened his mouth to deny any fuzzy feelings toward Buffy, then quickly shut it. He looked across the playground at the strange blonde girl who was now playing hopscotch with Willow. He thought about how much he enjoyed making her laugh, like when he used funny sounding British words. And how he got a stomach ache when she cried, like when that bully Riley Finn threw a basketball at her and hit her in the face. William remembered how ready he was to take on Finn, a boy double his size, because he had hurt her, but didn’t because she had asked him not to.

Coming to his conclusion, William then uttered the two word that, had his father been there, would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap, “Bloody hell.”

TBC

A/N: Present day Buffy enters next chapter! :)





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