AH WIP - Buffy and Spike, both exceptional fighters after childhood traumas, meet in high school.

Hi,

I'm looking for a fic that was put on permanent hiatus as the author felt that she was trying to shoehorn her characters into that of Buffy and Spike. I believe she continued it as an original fic on her Lj, but I am interested in the story as posted here. I recall quite a lot of detail as below....just not the crucial title or author name! Any help would be super-appreciated:

Buffy as a child witnesses the murder of her best friend and becomes determined to protect others. She begins martial arts, is naturally gifted and her sifu is Giles. He dies, I think, much later of an illness.

Joyce is keen for Buffy to be somewhat more feminine and insists she goes to pageants. Albeit reluctantly, Buffy's individual style sees her consistently do well much to the chagrin of one of the other girls who cuts up her dress at one event. Said girl (a maths genius but competes at pageants as her dad has no interest in her academic prowess) is later rescued by Buffy from rape and eventually they become close.

Buffy is dyslexic

Spikes tale begins in London with a loving home. His mum dies however and his father falls apart and Spike is neglected appallingly as a child. He is also bullied and runs into Ethan I think, who over the years becomes a mentor and turns Spike into a street fighter extraordinaire. There are hints of supernatural lore in this part of the story.

Spike is also dyslexic

The two meet in high school when Spike's aunt (he calls her Temily) moves him there.

I think the story you mean is posted in a LJ Comm now: http://stars-to-burn.livejournal.com/ (original) but it was last updated in July 2010.

Didn't she delete her story here?

The name of the author was Jardim1 and I think the story title was "Creare" because a LJ Link I have in my LJ memories as a reminder was called "Name Key for the story Creare" (that was deleted later).

Hopefully someone can help you finding the story; I think it was only posted at TSR.

I was thinking Creare too but some of the details of the above summary do not sound familiar to me. But the rest of it - the surreality of it, the author moving it to original fiction and stopping the spuffy fanfiction posting, them meeting as kids and being exceptional, etc. That sounds like Creare. I seem to remember them meeting as children in Italy for some reason though. There was a villa, and some mosaics and ruins... I don't know. I vote it was Creare. I really did like that story though and was disappointed when it stopped being posted as fanfiction and went to LJ as original fiction. LJ makes my head ache.

That's it! Thank you both so much some of the unfamiliar details may be from the original story version, which I did start to read before RL got in the way and I lost it.

Shame it's not been updated, it was so different and well-written too.

It really was an excellent story as far as it got. I miss it. And, you're welcome.